Boîte-hors-de-valise 14

The Davis Museum Barcelona is a conceptual art project symbolically founded inside a ballot box and disseminated primarily through social media. Conceived as a ready-made sculpture, it functions simultaneously as a digital archive, a nonprofit collective initiative, and a cultural entity officially recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya. The museum continues a lineage of artists who have founded their own institutions as poetic and political gestures—among them Marcel Duchamp with his «Boîte-en-valise» (1936–1941), Robert Filliou with the «Galerie Légitime» (1962–1963), and Marcel Broodthaers with the «Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles» (1968–1972).

This painting belongs to «The Paintings Section From Davis Museum Barcelona», the only section of the museum composed of works by my own hand and available for purchase. It is organized into thematic categories, with still lifes and portraits constituting two principal axes. The still lifes reimagine key works that articulate a critical narrative within the history of institutional critique—works such as the «Boîte-en-valise», the «Galerie Légitime», and the «Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles». The portraits, meanwhile, construct a conceptual gallery of the artists who pioneered these practices, portrayed not merely as historical figures but as theoretical positions within an ongoing metainstitutional discourse.

Conceptually, the painting draws from Duchamp’s «Boîte-en-valise» (1936–1941), a portable museum containing 89 miniatures of his most emblematic works—including «The Large Glass» and «Fountain»—disrupting conventional modes of display and authorship. Formally, it echoes the painting of Mariano Fortuny (1838–1874), renowned for his technical virtuosity and his sensitivity to light, texture, and historical atmosphere. The square format mirrors the cubic architecture of the museum; chromatically, the work belongs to the Full Color Period, begun in 2019 and ongoing.