[…] hanging representations of suspended life […] objects of consolation for our hectic lives, icons to be contemplated contemplate in pauses of rest for the eye and the spirit.
Miro Silvera
Still-life is a genre that Dady Orsi knows well in all its historical evolution: from Zurbaràn to Baschenis, from Cézanne to Morandi. Orsi knows how necessary it is to go beyond “the academic exercise of the pear and the apple” (this is how the critic Raffaele DeGrada defines that painting which reflects a pure formal construction). In his still-lifes, silent and poetic, a rarefied and rigorous composition creates a sense of suspension of time. Orsi concentrates on a few objects with an ordinary, lived-in air, rendered with a vibrant sign-painting that is flakier and more textured in the 1940s, more liquid and airy – until it reaches an almost immaterial lightness in the following decade. The works of the 1950s show a significant change in direction (parallel to that seen in the landscapes). The adoption, that is, of a language of geometric and simplified forms, borrowed from abstraction and Cubism. The use of certain shapes, such as concentric circles or spirals, determine effects of movement and radiation. The 1980s and 1990s saw a return to a more classical figuration and larger proportions. There are frequent references to 17th-century still-lifes (an example is the depiction of lutes and baroque musical instruments that recall the musical symbolism of the Baschenis suspended concert). In depicting the objects he has collected for a lifetime, Orsi prefers painting in neutral, opaque tones. In the ‘suspended life’ of these objects, the artist finds that solace so well described by the poet Miro Silvera. In the mid-1990s, he was inspired by Morandi’s painting: the works of this period, in fact, recall the balance and noble simplicity of the Bolognese Master. Eggs, fruit, crumpled newspapers, antiques seem to be caught just before or just after their daily use, like living elements in the flow of human activities.
