Boîte-hors-de-valise 2

Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, this painting reflects on the portable museum as both image and conceptual structure. Taking Duchamp’s suitcase of miniaturized works as a point of departure, the piece approaches the museum not as a stable container of objects, but as a form that can be displaced, reduced, and reimagined through painting.

Rather than describing the source with documentary precision, the work reduces the image to its essential structure, eliminating secondary detail in favor of a more distilled visual presence. The object remains legible, yet partially withheld, suspended between recognition and abstraction.

This tension gives the painting much of its force. Through a restrained pictorial language and compressed format, the image shifts away from archival clarity and toward a more reflective condition, where memory, reproduction, and museological form intersect.

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.