Musée des Aigles Modernes 16 (De Haan)

Davis Lisboa, Musée des Aigles Modernes 16 (De Haan), 2024. Oil on linen, 80 × 80 × 3.5 cm (31.5 × 31.5 × 1.38 in).

The painting brings together three elements drawn from Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, integrating them into a single image.

The figure of the soldier with the eagle, taken from Six lettres ouvertes Avis (1972), appears in profile, steady and self-contained. Rather than developing a narrative scene, it functions as a direct and legible image that introduces the relationship between figure, emblem, and representation.

From this profile, a sequence of colored commas —derived from Cinéma Modèle (1970)— runs across the upper part of the composition. In Broodthaers’ work, these signs originate in written language and are transferred into the visual field, where they lose their grammatical function to become autonomous forms. This shift places language in an ambiguous territory between reading and image, here maintained as a rhythmic structure based on repetition and variation.

The background refers to Le Coq beach on the Belgian coast, where Broodthaers produced Section Documentaire (1969), in De Haan. Reduced to bands of color, the landscape acts as a supporting plane in which these references converge, without explicit hierarchy, between documentary register and pictorial construction.

The work belongs to a tradition in which the museum becomes a subject of inquiry —from Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise to Robert Filliou’s Galerie Légitime and Broodthaers himself—. Within this framework, it connects to the Davis Museum, understood as a hybrid structure combining a readymade sculpture, an institution recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya, a digital archive, and a non-profit artistic project, where painting operates as a concrete extension of a broader system.