JG Ballard was best known for his pioneering dystopian fiction, and his twisted reimaginings of the technological landscape. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) – which tells of a man’s descent into psychosis amid the bustling, consumer world – was banned in the US, while Crash, published three years later, saw one critic proclaim Ballard as “beyond psychiatric help” (a diagnosis he often boasted about during interviews).

But more than a decade earlier, in 1958, Ballard created a series of unusual and mystifying commercial billboards, which he called Project for a New Novel. With their motley amalgam of seemingly unrelated scientific journal excerpts, perplexing words, names and phrases, they supposedly held some underlying narrative. But what exactly was it? The puzzle has mystified Ballardian scholars and enthusiasts for decades.

But we may finally have the answer: these billboards were encrypted replicas of Salvador Dalí paintings.

Ballard imagined these billboards spread across London, as a cryptographic narrative that would stand alongside the most powerful brands in the world. He was fascinated by the power of the consumer landscape on the unconscious mind, and how advertising was able to channel and manipulate society on a mass scale. While most billboard ads focus on quickfire bursts of information, eye-catching imagery and memorable phrases, Ballard inverted this process: stripping them of image in favour of text, and making the message wilfully inscrutable. In doing this he urged the viewer, the consumer, to formulate their own subjective narrative through these fragmentary collages, thus empowering the consumer and reinvigorating the imagination.

Ballard’s hankering for psychic stimulation was shared by the surrealist artists, who were among his biggest artistic influences. Most important of them all to him was Dalí whom the author hailed in a 2007 Guardian article as “the greatest painter of the 20th century”.

Returning to Ballard’s billboards in the context of his love of Dalí, a picture begins to emerge that links the esoteric words, names and phrases with soon-to-be-published stories.

One billboard, “mr f is mr. f”, refers to Ballard’s 1961 surrealist short story of the same name. It tells of a man who is steadily absorbed back into his mother’s womb, receding into a childlike state as the narrative progresses. By supplanting Ballard’s text with the characters and images they represent, taking into consideration the textual proportions and locations as indicated on the billboard, our minds can begin to conjure an imaginary image that mirrors one of Dalí’s most famous paintings – Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of New Man.

In this painting, the central figure of a man can be seen encased by a soft egg or womb, denoting the fracture of Europe at the peak of the second world war: Ballard’s story of a man who is steadily drawn back into his mother’s womb reflects this presiding image. But the most overt link can be seen through the two figures that stand to the bottom right of the egg: an androgynous figure and a traumatised infant. The block of shrinking text here coincides exactly with these eerie figures, who in Dalí’s painting seem to enact the regression to a state of societal infancy, and with it the futile descent into madness (this indicated by the word “mad” in the bottom right of Ballard’s final printed version of the billboard).

Another of Ballard’s billboards, T-12, mirrors Dalí’s 1931 painting Persistence of Memory. In both, there is an overriding theme of temporality. Ballard’s “time probe”, “time sea”, “let’s get out of time” seem to intimate some kind of apocalyptic countdown. The dominant “T-12” mirrors Dalí’s silver watch, hanging from a tree above the geometric block of wood with the hour hand pointing to 12.

As with the “mr f is mr. f” billboard, the text stands in for objects and figures in Dalí’s painting. Where the distant cliffs stand in Persistence of Memory, Ballard has printed the words “Volcano jungle”. The text “total bureau” corresponds exactly to where the geometric oblong of sand – which deliberately mimics a sturdy desk – appears in the painting.

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Had he managed to secure funding, these fascinating citywide Dalí billboards might have been one of Ballard’s greatest achievements, one more to add to a brimming literary career. The secret Dalí campaign is just a theory, but it sets you thinking: what else has Ballard been hiding from us?