Boîte-hors-de-valise 1

This still life takes Marcel Duchamp’s “Boîte-en-valise” as its motif: a portable museum in the form of a suitcase that gathers sixty-nine miniaturized reproductions of his key works, produced in paper, cardboard, and other reproducible materials. Poised between personal archive and transportable exhibition, the device displaces the status of the “original” toward a constellation of authorized copies.

Formally, the painting adopts the logic of Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings: the image appears as an unstable record, traversed by a will to erasure. Gray glazes, dry scumbling, and softened contours strain the figure–ground relationship, so that the object oscillates between legibility and disappearance within a square field.

The work belongs to the “Gray Period” of “The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona”, a miniature museum conceived as a readymade sculpture, a nonprofit collective art project, and a cultural entity recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya. Here, portraits reactivate the genealogy of artist-founded museums—Duchamp, Filliou, Broodthaers—while still lifes reinterpret their matrix works: “Boîte-en-valise”, “Galerie légitime”, and “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles”.