Robert Filliou #2 Painting

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou #2 Painting, 2015. Oil on canvas, 40 × 30 × 3.5 cm (15.75 × 11.81 × 1.38 in)

Inspired by the central black-and-white photograph of Robert Filliou included in the assemblage Autoportrait bien fait, mal fait, pas fait (1973), this painting approaches portraiture through a language of evocation, displacement, and formal instability. The figure appears suspended between presence and indeterminacy, activating an image shaped as much by memory as by omission.

Its visual treatment recalls the blurred condition of a photographic image, formally resonant with certain paintings by Gerhard Richter, or even with a television screen interrupted by static, reminiscent of domestic broadcasts from the 1960s. This unstable quality heightens the sense of the figure as apparition, trace, or interrupted transmission.

Part of The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, the work belongs to a body of paintings in which the medium operates simultaneously as image, device, and reflection on its own conditions of appearance. Within this framework, portraiture is displaced toward a more open field in which the figurative and the conceptual remain in productive tension.

Executed in oil on canvas, the work is marked by the immediacy of its formal resolution, evident in the precision of its blue tonality, compositional balance, and direct rhythm of brushwork. This economy of means reinforces the relationship between intuition, visual clarity, and conceptual structure.

The Johnny Temple Collection, Uxbridge, Canada