Davis Museum 1

Davis Lisboa, Davis Museum 1, 2011. Oil on linen, 30 × 30 × 3.5 cm (11.81 × 11.81 × 1.38 in)

Davis Museum 1 originates from a photographic image of the Davis Museum itself, later altered and translated into painting. Here, the original geometric structure appears transformed and partially eroded, shifting toward a precarious architecture that evokes improvised constructions and informal systems of occupation.

The work introduces a tension between institutional order and material fragility. Its deliberately unstable surface suggests a state of ruin or transformation, in which the museum no longer appears as a fixed form but as an exposed structure, vulnerable and open to reinterpretation. In this displacement, one can sense—subtly—the resonance of a painterly tradition shaped by architectural memory and the sedimentation of history.

Executed in oil on linen, the painting affirms the material density of the medium as an essential part of its visual construction. The square format, consistent throughout the series, alludes to the cubic architecture of the Davis Museum and reinforces the self-referential logic that runs through this body of work.

Integrated into The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, the work forms part of a miniature museum conceived as an artwork in itself. The series enters into dialogue with figures such as Marcel Duchamp and his Boîte-en-valise, Robert Filliou and his Galerie légitime, and Marcel Broodthaers and his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, articulating a group of paintings in which archive, institution, and image are condensed into an intimate and rigorously contained format.