Marcel Broodthaers 16

Davis Lisboa, Marcel Broodthaers 16, 2022. Oil on linen, 80 × 80 × 3.5 cm (31.5 × 31.5 × 1.38 in).

This painting takes as its point of departure a historical photograph of the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers during the presentation of Section Cinéma, one of the final divisions of his fictional museum project, the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. Developed between 1971 and 1972 in the basement of a former wine cellar in Düsseldorf, the space functioned simultaneously as an archive, screening room, studio, and meeting place, occupying an ambiguous territory between institutional construction and its own critical representation.

The composition reinterprets a specific image of Broodthaers standing beside a small children’s piano. Rather than reproducing the photograph literally, the painting condenses its atmosphere through a pictorial language inspired by medieval frescoes, defined by frontal composition, muted chromatic relationships, and a deliberate simplification of form. The painted surface evokes a material density and iconic frontality akin to Romanesque painting, where the image remains subordinated to a broader conceptual structure.

Through formal reduction, the figure appears suspended between contemporary document and archaic imagery, between documentary record and staged construction. The fragmented areas of color and geometry surrounding the body recall partially eroded mural remains, reinforcing this ambivalent reading while displacing the original archival reference toward a quieter reflection on representation, memory, and mechanisms of display.

The work forms part of The Paintings Section From Davis Museum Barcelona, the only section of the museum in which artworks are made available for acquisition. Conceived as an extension of the Davis Museum Barcelona project — a digital archive, portable museum, and collective artistic structure officially recognized as a cultural entity by the Generalitat de Catalunya — the work continues a lineage of artist-conceived museums that includes Boîte-en-valise by Marcel Duchamp, Galerie Légitime by Robert Filliou, and Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, in which the museum operates simultaneously as device, support, and artwork.