Boîte-hors-de-valise 11

Davis Lisboa, Boîte-hors-de-valise 11, 2017. Oil on linen, 50 × 50 × 3.5 cm (19.7 × 19.7 × 1.38 in).

A precise and restrained still life structures this painting around the idea of the museum as image. While the composition appears stable, it subtly shifts into a conceptual field where object, archive, and representation overlap.

The work is part of The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, a body of work that explores artists who conceived their own museums. It is organized along two lines: portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Filliou, and Marcel Broodthaers, and still lifes that reinterpret their key works, including Boîte-en-valise, La Galerie Légitime, and Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. Within this framework, the painting operates as a visual translation of these practices.

Drawing from Boîte-en-valise—conceived by Duchamp as a portable, miniature museum—Lisboa transposes this principle into painting through the still life format. Here, the museum ceases to function as a physical space and instead emerges as image: a contained form in which memory, reproduction, and display converge within a single plane.

The pictorial surface, developed in a restrained range of blues and yellows, carries a slight indeterminacy that recalls the procedures of Gerhard Richter. The image, subtly unstable, is structured by a quiet underlying geometry. The square format reinforces this logic, echoing the cubic structure of the Davis Museum and affirming the painting as a point of condensation where historical reference and institutional form converge with precision.