The true painter of the future will be a silent poet who who will not write anything down but will tell, without detail and in silence, an immense painting without limits.
Yves Klein
Dady Orsi’s art would be totally figurative if it were not for a group of completely abstract works, the so-called Letters from the Future, executed in 1959. This title implies a narrative element, assuming that the ‘letters’ were sent from a future civilisation, written in a script that is incomprehensible to us. This writing was invented by the artist, inspired by the Informal Sign Language, one of the languages of the artistic avant-garde of the time. If some of Paul Klee’s works were his precursors, in Italy the main exponents of this current are Accardi, Capogrossi, Crippa and Scanavino. The science-fiction theme of Letters from the Future coexists, however, with an inspiration from the deep past: the format of these works on paper is that of a long ribbon, like an unrolled papyrus (those from Qumran had recently been discovered). The viewer is free to imagine when they were delivered, with what technology, and what the message was. Of those scrolls exhibited in 1960 at the Libreria San Babila in Milan, eleven specimens remain today.
