Image: Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona
The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) has presented a proposal to recreate Francisco Mateos’s damaged painting ‘Milicià ferit’ using artificial intelligence, after determining that the work’s losses prevent its original image from being fully read.
MNAC restated the initiative in a Catalan-language social post on 21 August 2026, describing the painting as “profundament malmesa” (deeply damaged) and stating that the missing areas make it impossible to recover the original reading of the work. Rather than presenting the intervention as a conventional restoration, the museum frames it as a recreation carried out with AI.
The proposal is documented in a feature on the museum’s Canal +MNAC platform, published on 15 June 2026 under the title ‘Milicià ferit, el rescat d’una obra insalvable’. The feature sets out the process but does not specify which AI system was used, nor whether the generated images are intended as a permanent interpretive aid.
According to MNAC, the painting is a propaganda work made to condemn the cruelty of the Spanish Civil War and to celebrate solidarity between soldiers. It was produced in haste and with precarious, reused materials for the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris, the same pavilion that showed Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. The museum says the work has not been shown since it returned from Paris in 1938: first because it belonged to the silenced art of the defeated under the Franco dictatorship, and later because it was already too badly damaged.
MNAC attributes the condition to the way the work was made. Mateos joined two of his own paintings to obtain a larger canvas, and that reuse, together with poor-quality materials and probable haste, set off chemical reactions that make the paint flake continuously. The museum describes the deterioration as irreversible and progressive and says the losses cannot be filled without introducing invented or foreign material. For that reason the painting is kept tilted and under constant observation.
The announcement presents the reconstruction as a response to a specific conservation problem: the surviving material is insufficient to restore a complete visual reading of ‘Milicià ferit’. The museum’s wording distinguishes the proposed AI recreation from the recovery of the original painting itself.
No exhibition dates, public programme or additional venue are listed. The Canal +MNAC digital feature is identified as the place where the museum explains the process.
