Marcel Broodthaers 20 (Syntaxe)

Davis Lisboa, Marcel Broodthaers 20 (Syntaxe), 2024. Oil on linen, 80 × 80 × 3.5 cm (31.5 × 31.5 × 1.38 in).

This painting draws inspiration from a scene in La Pluie (Projet pour un texte), the experimental film created by Marcel Broodthaers in 1969, in which the artist writes while rain slowly erases the words from the page. The image reflects on the fragility of language and the transformation of writing into visual form, occupying an intermediate territory between literature, painting, and cinema.

The work introduces several elements absent from the original scene. Broodthaers’ figure appears more stylized, his clothing takes on an almost synthetic quality, and the architectural setting in the background is reduced to planes approaching abstraction. Most notably, the artist wears Robert Filliou’s Galerie Légitime: the paper gallery-hat conceived as a portable and nomadic structure for art. Its inclusion establishes a conceptual connection between Filliou and Broodthaers, as well as between two ways of understanding the museum as a mobile and experimental structure generated through artistic practice itself.

Formally, the composition is constructed through a geometric reduction of the human figure associated with certain proto-Cubist and Cubo-Futurist languages. The simplified planes and restrained atmosphere subtly evoke the visual economy present in some works by Kasimir Malevich, while maintaining a quiet and distinctly contemporary sensibility.

Through these references, the painting establishes a dialogue between Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, Filliou’s Galerie Légitime, and Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles—projects that proposed alternative models to traditional forms of artistic institutionalization and display. In parallel, the work becomes part of the conceptual framework of Davis Museum Barcelona, continuing an ongoing investigation into the museum as archive, artistic device, and contemporary critical space.