Boîte-en-valise 13

Davis Lisboa, Boîte-en-valise 13, 2022. Oil on linen, 30 × 30 × 3.5 cm (11.81 × 11.81 × 1.38 in).

Boîte-en-valise 13 extends Davis Lisboa’s sustained engagement with the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s portable museum, rearticulating its logic through the disciplined language of painting. Where Duchamp condensed his oeuvre into a self-contained archive, Lisboa translates this gesture into a single, autonomous surface, shifting emphasis from reproduction to presence.

The work operates within a precise economy of means. Its composition reflects a controlled system in which image, format, and structure converge, foregrounding the conditions through which artworks are framed, stored, and reactivated. The painting does not describe the archive; it performs it—compressing circulation, memory, and display into a resolved pictorial field.

Materially, the work is executed in oil on linen using traditional, high-grade pigments and mediums, reinforcing painting’s historical continuity while maintaining a distinctly contemporary clarity. The square format—consistent across the series—echoes the cubic logic of the Davis Museum, aligning object and institution within a shared formal syntax.

Color operates here as a temporal index. As part of a broader coded system developed by the artist, chromatic variation situates each work within an internal chronology, embedding duration into the surface while preserving the visual coherence of the whole.

The Carles Vidal Garganta Collection in Barcelona, Spain.