Dalia Hay Acco's 'chaotic overabundance'

All the paintings portray amorphous images of different sizes, executed in a technique of engraving in tar, sometimes mixed with acrylic or ink. Each one simulates an intimate movement with and within itself, while a wild dynamic unfolds between the images.

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, and 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 and day out.

Since then, Hay Acco’s mother passed away, and the collective crisis faded into a personal crisis. 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,” says Drumer. “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.”

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.