Musée des Aigles Modernes 21

Inspired by the «Section XIXe siècle» of the «Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles,» conceived by Marcel Broodthaers in 1968 at his residence on Rue de la Pépinière 30 in Brussels, this painting reinterprets the iconic black-and-white photograph that captured his satirical critique of the museum institution. Rather than replicating the image, my intention was to translate it into the language of painting, restoring its material density and expanding its layers of meaning. Unlike the original photograph, my interpretation introduces a dreamlike atmosphere bordering on surrealism, creating an ambiguous space where memory and imagination intertwine. The work explores thresholds between domestic and institutional spaces, fiction and archive, memory and representation. Painting this scene thus becomes an intervention in its narrative: the home transforms into a museum, the conceptual takes on material form, and the photographic is transfigured into a gesture imbued with irony and reverence.

The piece offers a dual reading: it stands as a tribute to Broodthaers while questioning how conceptual art has been documented and fixed through photographic imagery. By translating this scene into oil, I seek to restore the physical weight and presence that photography tends to flatten. The result invites viewers to pause, look carefully, and reconsider how we construct narratives of art institutions from a contemporary perspective.

This painting belongs to a broader investigation inspired by artists who envisioned their own museums—figures such as Marcel Duchamp with his «Boîte-en-valise» and Robert Filliou with his «Galerie Légitime.» In a similar spirit, the Davis Museum Barcelona—symbolically founded inside a ballot box and expanded through social media—functions as an institutional ready-made and a living archive of contemporary creation, bridging historical reflection and present-day critique.