“Self-portrait #2” (Space Oddity)

Inspired by “Space Oddity” (1969) by David Bowie, this self-portrait explores the existential alienation embodied by Major Tom: a drifting figure, disconnected from the world, encapsulated within a technology that both protects and isolates. Using a Facebook Augmented Reality filter, I generated a digital “selfie” with a virtual space helmet, later transmuted into oil on canvas. This gesture fuses pop iconography with the formal strategies of Gerhard Richter, whose blurred paintings interrogate the veracity of the image and the stability of the subject.

Here, the helmet functions not merely as a reference to the space race; it becomes a symbolic structure that directly evokes Robert Filliou’s “Galerie Légitime,” which positioned the exhibition space atop the artist’s head. In this sense, the helmet operates as a legitimate gallery of the future: portable, conceptual, and mediated by technologies of self-imaging.

The work is inscribed within a genealogical narrative of artists who founded their own museums—Duchamp, Filliou, Broodthaers—and materializes in the Davis Museum | The Davis Lisboa Mini-Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. Symbolically established within a ballot box and disseminated digitally, this museum-sculpture constitutes a critical institution officially recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

“Self-Portrait (Space Oddity)” belongs to the “Painting Section” of the museum—the only segment in which works are available for acquisition. Executed in Old Holland oil on linen, and articulated in a square format that echoes the museum’s cubic architecture, the painting adopts the institution’s signature blue as its chromatic field. It functions simultaneously as an aesthetic archive and as an act of institutional critique.