Musée des Aigles Modernes 13 (Prometheus)

This painting may be seen as a continuation of Marcel Broodthaers’ installation “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section Publicité” (1972), presented at Documenta 5. There, Broodthaers assembled a collection of eagle representations—from sculptures to beer labels—arranged in posters, postcards, and photographs. The installation questioned the eagle’s authority as an institutional symbol, revealing how cultural icons are diluted and commodified in the public image economy.

Formally, the work draws on classical compositional structures, though resolved in a contemporary pictorial language. It references Rubens’ “Prometheus Bound” (c. 1611–1618), where the titan suffers for gifting fire to humanity. Prometheus becomes a figure of creative defiance and sacrifice. Unlike Rubens, however, this version omits the eagle and instead presents the word “Aigles” hovering in a dark cloud—a gesture echoing Broodthaers’ practice of transforming text into visual form, shifting meaning from literary to plastic expression.

The painting’s initial study was generated using Stable Diffusion, integrating AI into traditional technique and blurring lines between digital and analog creation.

The piece aligns with a lineage of artists who created their own museological models as poetic critique: Duchamp with “Boîte-en-valise”, Filliou with “Galerie légitime”, Broodthaers, and Davis Lisboa with his Davis Museum, a ballot-box-shaped micromuseum recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

Executed in oil on linen, this work is part of “The Paintings Section From Davis Museum Barcelona”, the project’s only commercial arm. Its square format references the museum’s geometry and its classification under “Classical Mythology” reflects the artist’s inquiry into iconography and institutional critique.