Marcel Broodthaers 24 (Maracatú)

Davis Lisboa, Marcel Broodthaers 24 (Maracatú), 2024. Oil on linen, 60 × 30 × 3.5 cm (23.6 × 23.6 × 1.38 in).

This painting brings together three visual and conceptual references that converge within a single image. The first is a well-known photograph of Marcel Broodthaers taken in Brussels in 1969, in which the Belgian artist appears wearing a fake nose in front of a truck belonging to the art transportation company La Continentale Menkès during the filming of his experimental movie Un Voyage à Waterloo (Napoléon 1769–1969). The second reference is Galerie Légitime by Robert Filliou, the portable gallery conceived in 1962 as a folded paper hat designed to carry artworks beyond conventional exhibition spaces. Building from this piece, the painting transforms the hat into a geometric structure traversed by a chromatic composition inspired by the ceremonial colors of Maracatú, the Afro-Brazilian cultural tradition of Pernambuco.

Rather than presenting these references separately, the work integrates them into a scene situated between portraiture, symbolic construction, and visual fiction. The geometric forms emerging around the figure function simultaneously as festive ornament, performative disguise, and portable exhibition device. Through this layering of images and meanings, the painting reflects on cultural hybridity and the unstable boundaries between artwork, representation, and institution.

The piece belongs to The Paintings Section of Davis Museum Barcelona, the pictorial section of a conceptual museum project initiated in 2009. Conceived as a hybrid structure between museum, digital archive, and collective artistic project, the Davis Museum continues a lineage of artists who understood the museum itself as an artistic medium, including Boîte-en-valise by Marcel Duchamp, Galerie Légitime by Robert Filliou, and Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles by Marcel Broodthaers.