Boîte-en-valise 9

As part of The Paintings Section from Davis Museum, Boîte-en-valise 9 unfolds within an ongoing consideration of the museum as both form and operative structure. Conceived within Davis Museum Barcelona—an artist-founded institution extended through digital circulation—the work proposes a framework in which exhibition, archive, and object are no longer distinct categories, but coalesce into a single, self-contained system.

The title recalls La Boîte-en-valise by Marcel Duchamp, positioning the painting within a lineage of artist-conceived institutions. In this context, it resonates with Robert Filliou’s La Galerie Légitime and Marcel Broodthaers’s Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, where the exhibition format is reconfigured as a critical and self-reflexive construct.

Formally, the work engages a controlled instability of the image, drawing on the blurred pictorial language associated with Gerhard Richter. Developed from a projected photographic source, the painted surface is articulated through the measured dissolution of contours, suspending the image between appearance and withdrawal. The use of oil on linen, together with the square format, establishes a structural clarity aligned with the work’s underlying conceptual framework.

Produced during the artist’s “Blue Period” (2016–2020), Boîte-en-valise 9 crystallizes a sustained inquiry into the portable museum as both aesthetic proposition and critical position—an object that does not simply present an image, but stages the conditions of its own display.

The Daniel Marcoux Collection, Montreal, Canada