Robert Filliou #10

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou #10, 2017. Oil on canvas, 40 × 40 × 3.5 cm (15.75 × 15.75 × 1.38 in).

Conceived as an imaginary portrait of Robert Filliou, this painting presents the anonymous figure of a man in a suit whose face is concealed by a suspended bowler hat. The image activates a field of references that moves between a surrealist register and Filliou’s own poetic universe, where ordinary objects assume a precise conceptual charge.

The hat directly evokes the spirit of Galerie Légitime, Filliou’s portable gallery constructed from a simple folded paper hat. From this gesture, the work shifts portraiture away from representation toward a logic of evocation, absence, and symbolic construction.

Part of The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, the work belongs to the only section of the museum in which artworks have circulated through acquisition. Within this framework, it aligns with a broader practice that brings together painting, museological structure, and institutional imagination through a deliberately restrained formal language.

Executed in oil on canvas, the painting adopts a square format that echoes the museum’s compact architectural logic. Its monochrome blue palette, characteristic of Lisboa’s Blue Period (2016–2018), concentrates the image within a measured tension between presence, reproduction, and conceptual structure.

The Soteris Argyrou Collection, Nicosia, Cyprus.