Boîte-hors-de-valise 1

Davis Lisboa, Boîte-hors-de-valise 1, 2012. Oil on linen, 30 × 30 × 3.5 cm (11.8 × 11.8 × 1.38 in).

Part of the Gray Period of The Painting Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, this painting belongs to a body of works that reflects on the museum as both image and artistic medium. Within that framework, it enters into dialogue with Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, Robert Filliou’s Galerie légitime, and Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, extending a lineage of artist-founded museums shaped by institutional critique.

The work takes the form of a still life centered on Duchamp’s portable museum: the Boîte-en-valise, a suitcase containing miniature reproductions of key works. Rather than rendering the object with documentary precision, the painting reduces the image to its essential structure, eliminating descriptive detail in favor of a more concentrated visual presence.

This formal reduction is central to the work. Executed in a restrained gray monochrome palette, the painting moves away from descriptive fullness and toward a distilled image in which the object appears compressed, suspended, and partially withheld. What remains is not the totality of the archive, but its residual form.

The square format reinforces this sense of containment while echoing the geometry of Davis Museum Barcelona itself. Between still life, archive, and museological reflection, the painting proposes the portable museum not as a fixed container of works, but as a reduced and unstable structure through which the idea of the museum can be reimagined.