They are a link in a chain.
Keith Haring
All artists, even the most radical innovators, are always aware of the link with the past. As a profound conoisseur, Dady Orsi likes to re-enact images from art history. His latest cycle is a definitive reflection on the theme of continuity in art history. The cycle consists of 12 large canvases. Moving through the rooms of an imaginary museum, the artist unveils those relationships, similarities and kinship that stimulate his imagination. The individual paintings are dialogues in which a character from a work of the past is depicted as if it were three-dimensional and could move through the rooms of the imaginary museum, thus being able to observe other works of art that are similar to it. The observed work, on the other hand, remains two-dimensional and closed within the space of its own frame. By choosing the works to be given the parts in these “dialogues”, Orsi creates his own personal anthology of painting populated with images whose historical origins range from the deep prehistory of Lascaux to Picasso. The noble father of this operation is André Malraux. In his book Le Musée imaginaire, Malraux points out the potential of a visual dialogue between works of art from different eras and countries of origin. Closer to home, the critic Philippe Daverio has developed this comparative approach throughout his work and in his book The Imagined Museum. The importance of mise en scène reconnects Orsi to the world of theatre, where he was a young set designer in the 1940s and which played such a large part in his cultural formation. Painted in the early 1990s, this cycle is influenced by the postmodern climate, in which the practice of appropriation enjoys a legitimacy it did not previously have.
