Self-portrait 1

Davis Lisboa, Self-portrait 1, 2011. Oil on linen, 30 × 30 × 3.5 cm (11.8 × 11.8 × 1.38 in)

Based on a photograph taken by Pep Àvila in 2016, Self-portrait 1 places self-representation within a territory of distance, suspension, and formal control. Rather than asserting itself as an autobiographical image, the work shifts portraiture into a zone of visual ambiguity, where presence is filtered through painting and subjected to a logic of translation.

The composition recalls procedures associated with Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings, particularly in its use of blur, glazing, and the tension between definition and dissolution. Here, these devices do not operate as quotation, but as structure: the image remains deliberately unstable, oscillating between recognition and disappearance.

The painting belongs to The Paintings Section From Davis Museum Barcelona, the pictorial core of the museum founded by the artist in 2009 as a ready-made sculpture, digital archive, collective project, and cultural entity officially recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya. Within this series, portraiture becomes part of an ongoing investigation into image, authorship, and institutional construction.

Executed in oil on linen and concentrated within an intimate, precise format, the work belongs to the Blue Period (2016–2018), a phase marked by greater chromatic reduction and atmospheric density. Self-portrait 1 clearly condenses one of the central concerns of Davis Lisboa’s practice: painting understood as image, archive, and critical device.