The work can be understood as a form of détournement in the Situationist sense. The advertising display case is neither destroyed nor removed from public space; instead, its material, spatial, and medial structure is retained while its function is altered. A medium ordinarily oriented toward commercial communication, recognizability, and the production of desire is redirected toward another pictorial use. The intervention therefore does not operate outside the existing order, but within its own infrastructure. It uses the visibility, framing, and public presence of that system in order to interrupt its original purpose.
This shift concerns more than the content of the advertising surface. It also redirects attention toward the conditions under which images appear in public space. Illumination, format, location, and framing are not merely technical properties of the display case, but components of an apparatus that guides perception and grants certain images privileged visibility. Once the commercial message is removed, this infrastructural function becomes more apparent. The advertising medium no longer appears as a neutral container, but as an active element within the public order of images.
The inserted motif intensifies this interruption. It emerges from the repeated reproduction of a black circle whose geometric closure gradually dissolves through displacement, copying, and renewed duplication. The deviations produced by this process generate a marbled visual structure, fragments of which are selected, assembled, and condensed into a serially extensible form. In place of a clearly addressed advertising message appears an image that resists immediate functional legibility. It neither informs, advertises, nor promises.
The critical force of the work lies precisely in this difference. It does not simply replace advertising with art, but temporarily suspends the visual logic of advertising. The display case remains visible, yet its function becomes open and negotiable. In this way, the work produces a deliberate disruption within the everyday circulation of images in the city. Public visibility no longer appears as self-evident, but as a spatially, economically, and medially organized order that can be repurposed and redefined.
LOCATION: LISBON
YEAR OF PRODUCTION: 2017
DIMENSIONS: 160 X 100 CM
EDITION: SINGLE PIECE
TYPE OF WORK: PAINTING