Robert Filliou 22

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou 22, 2021. Oil on canvas, 60 × 60 × 3.5 cm (23.62 × 23.62 × 1.38 in).

Taking as its point of departure an iconic black-and-white photograph of Robert Filliou wearing his Galerie Légitime, Robert Filliou 22 returns to a singular image in the history of postwar art through the material and temporal distance of painting. Rather than reconstructing the photographic document, the work subjects it to a restrained pictorial translation, in which image, surface, and memory remain suspended in a state of quiet tension.

The painting is structured through the visual logic of the archive and of reproduction, sustaining a precise tension between clarity and dissolution. Its chromatic intensity and slight instability of form evoke the ambiguous condition of the document once translated into oil, when it ceases to function as fixed evidence and instead acquires a more open presence, situated between trace, interpretation, and historical persistence. The source image refers to Filliou’s Galerie Légitime—a folded paper hat conceived as a portable gallery—as well as to the broader context of The Frozen Exhibition and its subsequent “defrosting,” presented in London in 1962 as part of the Festival of Misfits.

As in other works by Davis Lisboa, art history appears here not as a repertoire of citations, but as an active system of transmission. Filliou’s figure is situated within a genealogy of artists who integrated the museum, the archive, or institutional fiction into the very core of their practice, among them Marcel Duchamp with his Boîte-en-valise, Robert Filliou with his Galerie Légitime, and Marcel Broodthaers with his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. From this perspective, The Painting Section of Davis Museum Barcelona brings together both portraits of these artists and representations of their works, constituting a body of work articulated around the relationship between authorship, archive, museum, and image.

Executed in oil on canvas, the work belongs to the artist’s Full Color Period (2019–present) and forms part of the Painting Section of Davis Museum Barcelona. Within Lisboa’s practice, painting functions simultaneously as image, document, and museological extension, situating each work within a rigorous continuity between contemporary representation and institutional form.

The Kirn Apartments Collection, Seattle, Washington, USA.