Musée des Aigles Modernes 6

Davis Lisboa, Musée des Aigles Modernes 6, 2018. Oil on linen, 50 × 50 × 3.5 cm (19.7 × 19.7 × 1.38 in)

The painting is defined by an abrupt cut: a displaced framing that removes the center of the figure and concentrates the image on the lower part of the body. This gesture, akin to a cinematic tilt down, introduces a deliberate deviation of the gaze, shifting it away from the face toward a less stable zone, where representation loses its conventional hierarchy.

Based on a 1972 photograph by Bernd Jansen—in which Marcel Broodthaers appears next to a small piano in the Section Cinéma of his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles—the work does not reconstruct the scene, but reconfigures it as an incomplete, displaced, and open image.

The pictorial language is structured through a deliberate loss of definition. In proximity to the photo-paintings of Gerhard Richter, blur is here replaced by fluid applications of oil paint, handled almost like watercolor. These layers do not describe the image—they produce it, holding it in an unstable state, suspended between appearance and disappearance.

Within this framework, the painting activates a logic in which the museum becomes pictorial material, in dialogue with Marcel Duchamp (Boîte-en-valise), Robert Filliou (Galerie légitime), and Broodthaers himself (Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles). Integrated into The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, the work occupies a point of convergence between image, institution, and fiction, where framing itself operates as a form of thought.