This is one of the artist’s most finely rendered automata. The power and personality of the central figure is such that it seems determined to escape from the painting and take on a life of its own.

The talent of this painter, architect and stage designer is patent in the quality of his composition and in the perfection of his drawing. He thrives on depicting fictive, dream-like landscapes and characters, loaded with symbols rooted in religion, mythology, literature, history, comics, etc., represented in a disturbing and ironic setting in which the influence of surrealism and to a lesser extent of metaphysics is evident.

In this painting the artist indulges his liking for automata. It represents a modern version of the Canard Digérateur, the digesting duck created in 1738 by the French engineer Jacques Vaucanson —a work in gilded copper in the shape of a duck, capable of eating, digesting and evacuating and whose digestive process was visible through its see-through abdomen.

Martín Begué’s duck is of a different kind. It looks like a real duck except for the presence of a winding key and a nut around its leg. The reference to Vaucanson is made through the drawing of the clockwork mechanism and the name visible in the label, which Martín Begué customises by adding an extra “s” with which he may be expressing a wish to singularise his own creation. The process is the same though taken a step further in its modernisation. The pâté the duck produces is packaged and stored, ready for consumption as signalled by the inclusion of a tin opener. The gaze of the duck in the painting, seemingly protective of what it has created, is both ironic and threatening.