Dalia Hay Acco | I Came By, Felt Awful, and Left…

The exhibition presents two bodies of work—large-scale paintings on canvas, and small works on wooden boards—which together constitute one corpus, the sequel of an intensive work process that began in 2021 and continued almost until the opening of this exhibition. Dalia Hay Acco's works await the viewers at the entrance to the gallery, accompanying them along the wall to the interior space, where over a thousand small works of varying dimensions are installed on wooden surfaces, engraved in tar, acrylic, and ink.
All the paintings portray amorphous images of different sizes, executed in a technique of engraving in tar, at times mixed with acrylic or ink; organic images of internal organs, reproductive and sensory organs, and inner body fragments that can be read as an organic-mental occurrence. Her paintings are boundless. Each one simulates an intimate movement with and within itself, while a wild dynamic unfolds between the images. The works appear as though they have been spilled, flung, splashed, and splattered on the wall.
Luning
Hay Acco's current work began in the 2021 exhibition "Luning" presented at the Tel Aviv Artists' House. The works in that exhibition were created daily throughout an entire calendar year, as a repetitive documentation of a self-portrait—moods, memories, thoughts, experiences, events. Each work constituted a record of a different time, a different situation, a different state; the transition from one work to another seemed like gliding from time to time, from one state to another. In her repetitious movement, day in day out, Hay Acco documented and registered in writing. In my text for that previous exhibition, I proposed considering her work at the time as a cycle in which she herself transpires—lunes.
The exhibition called upon the viewer to observe the works as a totality, while also allowing perusal of each image separately. The installation as a whole thus formed a lunar calendar of sorts, while the products of the daily ritual served as a living testimony to the uniqueness of each and every day as a singular mental lunar spectacle. The installation assembled the works into one corpus.
Those works were created, for the most part, during the COVID-19 crisis, at a time of lockdown and isolation, which reinforced their relevance as documentation of the affects of an event—an exceptional global crisis. During the work on the project, the daily ritual acquired new meaning and value. On the one hand, the daily process turned into a research and mapping "laboratory" in which each work ties the individual-personal and the collective together. The COVID "lab" allowed for a profound observation of the diverse affects—the experiences, feelings, and meanings under the imposed restrictions and decrees. On the other hand, in such an extreme situation, in which the familiar routine was forgotten, each individual was required to reinvent one's daily cycle, so as to reinstate oneself with the lost consistency. I therefore proposed to regard Hay Acco's work as one designed to replace the ordinary order of things lost during a chaotic crisis; namely, to regard it as the construction of a template for a private diary. A private—lunar—calendar.
Engraving the Loss: Visceral Impulsive Script
In the time gap between "Luning" and the present exhibition, Hay Acco's mother passed away. The collective crisis faded into a personal crisis, and the repetitious personal diary, which had an organizing dimension (one work a day for 365 days), collapsed into continued work under a new, chaotic, repetitious personal commandment, devoid of boundaries and time. The installation of these works is an attempt to contain a chaotic overabundance—like the shattering of intact images into particles, gaping them and looking into their interior—enabling a "new revelation" of reason and a new order.
The work process described in "Luning" continued to evolve towards the works featured in the current exhibition. The fault line that appeared in the "Luning" images has now deepened into more internal strata, and was turned toward a personal abyss of loss and bereavement. Hay Acco's work departs from a reasoning that cannot be formulated or conveyed. She engraves the loss in the material as a raw, crude, disorderly experience that cannot be transcribed. It is the void, the loss, the black hole that is engraved and inscribed in the tar, transforming the surface into an abode of crushed and dismantled internal organs.
The experience of the mother's loss emerges in the images of reproductive and sensory organs, allowing one to discern a prospect of rebirth in the horizon of the death experience; as if the caesural fault line is a coastline manifested as a constant motion between the life instinct and the death drive, between Eros and Melancholy. The engraving in tar and in black-gray-brown paints introduces a bestial survival instinct, a senseless movement of a primal drive, the screams of fragments.
Pain Organs, Draining
Hay Acco attests: "I pour everything out, I'm drained, incapable... I drain, pour out...". Her words remind me of Didier Anzieu and Michèle Monjauze's description of Francis Bacon's (1909–92) painting process: "When he talks about 'capturing the feeling,' his legs fail in front of the camera, he outlines a dizzying space with his hands, freeing the desire to cast his incomprehensible alcohol body onto the canvas." He must drink, erase himself, and only then can he embark on the path of painting; he spews and attacks the canvas.
The engravings scattered on the wall can be seen as remnants, or traces, of an experience of congestion, excess; an intense load of sensations that has not found a relief. Her paintings are a kind of wordless script of primal drives, an engraving of "intrinsic forms," letters of the interior. Their juxtaposition makes it possible to identify the conversion of the body's anxiety and its pains into images in tales on canvas and on pieces of wood.
Hay Acco's engraving involves repetitious movement, eliciting a sense of dark materiality in the viewer. The urgency and compression are present in the material as well as in the image, which also treasures the screams, howls, and inaudible pain. An abstract, figurative world of internal organs, flesh charged with meaning, organs of pain, is thus created.
The organs of pain appear in an obsessive rhythm like organs secreted, extracted, subtracted, and expelled, like remnants that rise from toxic tar (produced as a by-product of coal or oil) from the depths of the artist's soul; a muddy, viscous substance, superfluous appendages. When these pieces of the large complete works take on a life of their own, they are present as remnants that are not disposed of, but rather put on display bare and naked.
"As if my hand were the umbilical cord"
Hay Acco gives us access to an intimate private space of primary mental qualities: over a thousand variously sized works, spanning what appear to be trunks, branches, roots, snakes, arteries, pipes, wires, hairs, paths, roads, and routes, all of which can be perceived as different manifestations of the umbilical cord that connects mother and daughter, the cord to an ancient inner world, the nine-month world, the world of connection, primal bond, and physical symbiosis. "I paint from the gut," says Hay Acco. "I paint from the disintegration of the mother, from the death of something that enables me to paint, to represent, to convey its works through my hand, as my gaze is turned inward and the hand draws outward, as if my hand were the umbilical cord—the cord of connection."
It is as though the painting spills out, scratching its way from the interior out to the surface. It is set free. The works are an externalization of an imaginary inner space that takes shape; a life process that lends visibility to the invisible. Hay Acco constructs symbolic spaces that can contain and express the precious hidden lives threatened by extinction, and may dismiss the experience of loss as worthless. The eternal intimate experience of an inner life of pain transforms into images in motion. It is a ritual of mourning which enables life after death, also because it turns to the other, inviting the viewer to witness its outcomes. It is a revelation of the invisible experience of pain.

Ori Drumer, curator and cultural researcher
September 2023