Robert Filliou 16

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou 16, 2017. Oil on canvas, 40 × 40 × 3.5 cm (15.7 × 15.7 × 1.38 in).

Based on a photographic portrait of Robert Filliou, this painting shifts the artist’s image into a state of suspension and distance. Softly veiled, the figure hovers between appearance and disappearance, turning the portrait into an unstable presence rather than a fixed likeness.

The work forms part of The Paintings Section From Davis Museum, a series in which Davis Lisboa brings together portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Filliou, and Marcel Broodthaers alongside still lifes related to some of their most emblematic works. Taken together, these paintings trace a narrative around artists who not only produced artworks, but also imagined and constructed their own institutional frameworks.

In this context, Filliou appears not simply as a historical figure, but as part of a broader lineage in which the artist becomes inseparable from the structures through which art is exhibited, circulated, and legitimised. The painting does not illustrate this condition directly; rather, it condenses it into a restrained and deliberately unstable image.

Formally, the work translates photography into painterly language through blur, veiling, and dissolution. The result is a controlled surface that preserves the trace of the document while opening it onto a more indeterminate image, where portrait, archive, and institution converge.