Il-Ħabba tal-Għajn

Il-Ħabba tal-Għajn follows Alex Dalli’s painterly journey from the figurative into the abstract. Sitting at the cusp between the Modern and the Contemporary, Dalli’s practice has evolved from a desire to escape the difficult conditions of childhood to a deeper concern with the spiritual in art. 

As Dalli’s gaze turned from the external to the internal, his work necessitated a parallel sloughing of form in order to express subtle ideas, feelings and non-embodied concepts. Over the course of his career, his images developed into colour-driven palimpsests where a concern with texture, surface, line and balance predominate. 

Dalli’s images merge the personal and the universal with a special focus on the small and the unseen. He thinks of the creative act in cosmic terms – “just as I myself grow, and the world develops around me, I also want to grow things and nourish that human creative ability, which mirrors the first act of creation”. Nevertheless, he couches his minimalism in a language of humility, seeing his role as artist in reductive terms, where he chips away at his subject until an essential and unostentatious core of truth is reached. 

In history and literature, there is an archetype of the poet/artist who, as he gradually goes blind and loses sight of the external world, gains a deeper, steadier, internal vision. Homer, for example, went blind, as did Jorge Louis Borges, James Joyce and John Milton. Alex Dalli is also losing his sight. As he goes blind to the world around him, his paintings open, through the deep darkness, a single bright eye (għajn), which has the capacity to pare back and reveal the centre (ħabba) and hidden reality of things. Il-Ħabba tal-Għajn traces this arc, following the artist’s long walk down the luminescent corridors of his own blindness. 

The exhibition takes its cue from Michael Zammit’s Għana ’l Hena (APS, 2005), which is a cycle of poetry inspired by Sanskrit philosophy and mantra meditation. Zammit uses language to do the same thing Dalli does with paint, and his words provide a context and touchstone for reading Dalli’s complexly coded images.