Robert Filliou 5

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou 5, 2016. Oil on linen, 30 × 30 × 3.5 cm (11.8 × 11.8 × 1.38 in).

Conceived as a reimagined portrait of Robert Filliou, this painting begins with a small sculpture of a top hat—an allusion to Galerie légitime, the portable gallery Filliou carried as a model of art’s mobility and informality. Translated into painting through an intermediary photographic image, the work approaches portraiture as a constructed and indirect form.

Rather than describing the figure with precision, the painting reduces the image to a sparse and generic presence, allowing the portrait to remain deliberately open. What emerges is less a fixed likeness than an evocation shaped by displacement, simplification, and visual distance.

That instability is central to the work. The portrait appears as something remembered, reconstructed, or only partially retrieved, holding together figuration and absence within a tightly controlled pictorial field.

Part of The Painting Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, the work belongs to the only section of the museum in which artworks are available for acquisition. Within this broader framework, it extends a lineage shaped by Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, Robert Filliou’s Galerie légitime, and Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, where the museum itself becomes an artistic medium.