BB had a deep affinity for Dutch “Golden Age” painting, a result perhaps of her many years in Amsterdam, but more pertinently of a shared love of the material world. These were painters fascinated by framing: not only in the form of coy devices like the pulled-back drape at the edge of the canvas, but in the literal depiction of framed pictures within their pictures. (We know the artists whose paintings Vermeer owned because he showed them so often in his own paintings.) In David Bailly’s picture, things and pictures are arrayed across the surface of his canvas. Whatever his allegorical intentions, Bailly’s concern with the observable world, in all its idiosyncratic particulars, has trumped conventional narrative. BB’s peekaboo mounting only exacerbates Bailly’s pre-occupation with distracting surfaces and the limpid connections of thoughts and things.
“[…] In Cosmos, I am telling the simple story of a simple student. This student goes to spend his holidays as a paying guest in a house where he meets two women, one has a hideous mouth which has been ruined by a motor car accident, while the other has an attractive mouth. The two mouths are associated in his mind and become an obsession. On the other hand he has seen a sparrow hanging from a wire and a piece of wood hanging from a thread… . And all this, a little out of boredom, a little out of curiosity, a little out of love, out of violent passion, starts dragging him towards a certain means of action … to which he abandons himself, but not without skepticism. […] Cosmos is an ordinary introduction to an extraordinary world, to the wings of the world, if you like.” – W. Gombrowicz
