Musée des Aigles Modernes 20

Davis Lisboa, Musée des Aigles Modernes 21, 2025. Oil on linen, 80 × 80 × 3.5 cm (31.5 × 31.5 × 1.38 in).

The image is constructed from a fragment of a convex mirror, derived from Miroir d’époque régence (1973) by Marcel Broodthaers. Isolated from its original form, the motif loses its decorative function and is presented as an active surface in which the idea of reflection is held in suspension. In Broodthaers’ work, this shift extends beyond the logic of the readymade: once integrated into the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, the mirror no longer guarantees visibility, but instead exposes the limits of representation within the institutional frame.

Lisboa retains only the lower section of the object, deliberately omitting the eagle that crowns the original frame. This reframing reduces the symbolic weight of the whole and concentrates attention on the structure of the image itself. The fragment no longer points to a missing totality, but asserts itself as an autonomous field in which surface becomes decisive.

Within the mirror, reflection is replaced by an abstract space that recalls the pictorial language of Clyfford Still. This operation does not introduce an image so much as interrupt the specular logic: the mirror ceases to reflect and becomes painting. What should appear is withheld, and in that gesture the image reorganizes itself as a tension between presence and absence.

The work is situated within a line of inquiry that reconsiders both the status of the image and its conditions of display. In dialogue with works such as Boîte-en-valise by Marcel Duchamp, Galerie légitime by Robert Filliou, and Broodthaers’ own museological constructions, the painting forms part of The Painting Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, where each work is embedded within a structure that articulates artwork, archive, and institutional frame as a single field of meaning.