The focus on allegorical and iconographical traditions, characteristic as it is for Baldessari's artistic practice, is also recognizable in his new work-group Double Feature: What is significant of these image-text montages is the utilization of concrete pictorial motifs from the history of modern art from Henri Matisse, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst, all the way to Francis Picabia. From these models, Baldessari extracts in his customary manner selected elements which are printed onto canvas and are individually overpainted by himself. This gives rise to hybrid works in which the sources of the motifs and the handwriting of the artist coexist in the painted flow of the surfaces. Oscillating between collage and painting, Baldessari's versions do not consist of decontextualized copies but instead present autonomous originals which repeat painting and its forms of appearance from a different perspective.

Baldessari combines these motifs with printed captions upon the canvas. There are quotes of gloomy titles of American film noir from the 1940s and 1950s such as Blast of Silence, Dead Reckoning, Sudden Fear, or Deadline at Dawn. During this era, the thrillers filmed in black-and-white were often low-budget productions. Characteristic for this genre are nightmarish stories which mirror the abysses of existential and social crises.

The fascination with B-movies and nouvelle vague films is one of the constants running through Baldessari's oeuvre; he has taken their gestures, drama, and glamorous passion into a large number of compositions utilizing stills from unknown Hollywood motion pictures. Serving as an important source of inspiration in this context is Jean-Luc Godard's experimental handling of cinematic montage, which makes use of such techniques as leaps in time or space between individual film segments (jump cuts) and, by means of these distancing and distorting effects, destroy the film's power of illusion.

In Baldessari's new collages, the verbal combinations contrast with the motifs and summon up complex series of associations, inasmuch as two different areas are brought together: the works of avant-garde artists which today are considered to be high culture, and the American crime thrillers of the postwar era which are relegated to the status of B-movies. He thereby establishes subtle formal and contextual relationships between titles and pictures. The series gives rise to pictorial puzzles in which the extracted individual segments become something entirely different when inserted into a new picture. In this way the artist aims at cultural memory and engages in a play involving recognition of the contexts from which the elements derive. For Baldessari, images and words are of equal value, and with them he creates his own poetry whose language asserts itself over and beyond social value-systems and linguistic limitations.