Art is never chaste.
Pablo Picasso
The theme of Eros pervades Dady Orsi’s work. In his vast production of female nudes, the artist reveals the other side of the bourgeois woman who, like the Maja desnuda, is depicted in all her seductive power. Even at its most extreme, Orsi’s eroticism is never prosaic: his preferred type is that of the sophisticated woman, with noble features, who seduces with natural poses. Techniques and materials are varied: the works on canvas and wood, always in tempera, tend to be painted in a defined manner and with a greasier paint, those on paper see the use of a technique made up of discontinuous signs, in which pastel and gouache create plots of light and transparent signs. As far as image processing is concerned, Orsi uses a variety of approaches: he draws from memory, uses models but does not disdain the use of photographic images. The nude made its first sporadic appearance in some drawings and paintings from the 1940s. Still reluctant to exhibit these works, in the 1960s he increasingly devoted himself to the female nude. It was only from the 1970s onwards that there was an explosion of erotic paintings. The moment was propitious: the theme ceased to be taboo in mass culture. The first exhibition of nudes was held in 1975 at the Galleria Mainieri. The works exhibited revealed an exquisitely realistic eroticism that clashed with the then predominant tendencies of the representation of the female body, which were more critical and intellectual. These were the years in which the international artistic debate questioned whether eroticism had a right to citizenship or should be relegated to the sphere of pornography. Orsi shows what the public wants to see, but what culture does not consider to be innovative. At the end of the 1970s, when the erotic art of Lautrec, Klimt and Schiele had not yet attracted mainstream interest, Orsi produced monumental series of drawings (and engravings) representing women in explicit poses. In representing the perturbing side of the woman of his time, the artist revisits the manner and style of his illustrious models.
