Robert Filliou 19

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou 19, 2019. Oil on canvas, 40 x 40 x 3.5 cm (15.75 x 15.75 x 1.38 in).

Conceived from a photograph centered on the assemblage Autoportrait bien fait, mal fait, pas fait (1973) by Robert Filliou—in which the artist appears wearing his Galerie Légitime, a folded paper hat conceived as a portable commercial gallery—the work occupies a critical space where portrait, citation, and conceptual device converge. Rather than simply referencing Filliou as a historical figure of Fluxus, the painting reactivates his interrogation of authorship, iconicity, and symbolic circulation through a deliberately unstable image. The portrait thus ceases to function as a fixed representation and instead becomes a displaced index, a rewritten archive, and an emblem of mobile museology.

Formally, the work engages with Gerhard Richter’s strategy of translating photographic imagery into painting through blur, erasure, and the suspension of clarity. This process undermines the documentary authority of the source, rendering the image as an ambiguous surface suspended between memory, reproduction, and fiction. Integrated into The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, the piece aligns itself with a lineage of artists who imagined or constructed their own museums—Marcel Duchamp with La Boîte-en-valise, Robert Filliou with La Galerie Légitime, and Marcel Broodthaers with Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles—extending this critical tradition through painting. Within this framework, the work operates not as a museum in itself, but as an institutional fragment, a painterly translation of the archive, and an autonomous unit within an expanded institutional structure.