Robert Filliou 23 (Museum)

Davis Lisboa, Robert Filliou 23 (Museum), 2021. Oil on canvas, 70 × 70 × 3.5 cm (27.6 × 27.6 × 1.38 in)

Based on a still from Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, Part 2 (1979) by Robert Filliou, this painting is situated within a lineage in which the museum is reimagined as an artistic form. A central figure in Fluxus, Filliou developed an expanded practice spanning action, language, pedagogy, and audiovisual production, opening new ways of thinking about the artwork, its circulation, and its institutional context.

The work also engages with the logic of Galerie Légitime (1962–1963), the gallery hidden in a hat through which Filliou extends Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise and anticipates Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. Rather than functioning as a historical reference alone, these coordinates place the painting within a broader reflection on authorship, exhibition, and the museum understood as a conceptual device.

Formally, the image is constructed through a dense and materially active surface in which the figure appears partially dissolved into the surrounding field. Layers of oil, glazes, and thicker accumulations of paint generate an unstable pictorial space in which portrait and atmosphere remain inseparable, giving the work a presence that is at once intense and elusive.

The painting belongs to The Paintings Section From Davis Museum Barcelona, where portraiture becomes a way of reconsidering postwar conceptualism through painting. Executed in oil on canvas and contained within a square format that echoes the museum’s cubic structure, the work belongs to the Full Color Period (since 2019), a phase marked by heightened chromatic intensity and emotional density.