Cosmos in the Mind as the Primal Ground of Art

Even before the Hubble Telescope set off on its journey into the depths of outer space and long before its first fantastic images of star nebula and galaxies were received on earth, in the eighties of the last century OUBEY painted a series of pictures, to which one of the five volumes of the MINDKISS book is dedicated. This volume is entitled “The Cosmos in the Mind as the Primal Ground of Art”.

At first glance, one of these pictures looks like a dark mystery. In her encounter with this picture in February 2010, the astronomer Dr. Cecilia Scorza from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg deciphered this dark mystery from her perspective.

“That is a courageous look”

For her, this picture shows “the universe from the very beginning, as the first galaxies emerged. We are not that far yet in astronomy. We imagine that it was like what I see here. But we have not yet had a chance to see these origins. It is a question of maybe one or two years, until we can see something like this before our telescopes.”

When OUBEY painted, this act was an attempt to materialize the pictures already complete in his mind as “authentically” as possible. To be able to paint a picture like this in the mid-eighties, he must have had “the cosmos in his mind”. As soon as the telescopes of the next generation are capable of transmitting real images to us of the time of the origin of the universe, OUBEY’s “courageous look” will be comparable with this real images for us. Sadly, no longer for himself.

You can watch the entire Encounter between Dr. Cecilia Scorza and this picture by OUBEY here.