2015/2016. GRISAILLES, Radnička Gallery, Zagreb

(…) The perception, or reception, of the observer proves to be particularly important here since the logos – which in the given context needs to be understood as word or the meaning of the word uttered, has to be communicated, to become dia-logos, in other words, a meaningful dialogue between painting and receiver, between painter and viewer. What is happening in this interactive internalisation (or so as recipient I respond, so do I reap, what Zanze the painter has assiduously and adroitly sown in the images) is that her letters on a grey ground are in a sense Heraclitan-Stoic seed logoi (Greek lógoi spermatikoì; Latin rationes seminales) that through their active principle activate and make current the passive matter and thus put the world in order (Greek kósmos: ʹornamentʹ, ʹorderʹ) so harmonising phenomenal and conceptual reality. The dead monochromes (so the history of modern painting refers to these paintings) were sown by Anabel Zanze with the letter-germs of life. Out of the greyness of the image on which is written ashy soil is born not the phoenix but words. The grey cells in the brain, physiological habitats where the logos lurks in countless sparks, have supported the painter’s creative impulse, her conceptual stimulant. This led from the grey to the living.

From this point of view from the Grisailles exhibition catalogue it is worth reading the conclusion of the essay of Igor Zidić: “The presence, whether explicit or implicit, of earth in grey refers to its somewhat transformed specific gravity, which in this case is not preponderantly aerial (in connection with rain and fog, with atmospheric changes, in connection with occluding but is anchored in the ground, is bound to the primary, to the more weighty. To be gathered in such a reading is the anticipated assumption that the ashy ground, earth into which the grey seed has been cast, after a suitable period, will turn into the hotbed of that white or black. As if the earnest of their lastingness, the seed, is placed into the ground and as if the first drops of rain are awaited from the sky.”

To end, I would say that Anabel Zanze has opened up a path for an effective yoking of the Aristotelian-cum-Scholastic metaphysical dichotomy of possibility-reality/act (Greek dýnamis – enérgeia; Latin potentia – actus): grey symbolises nature, matter, possibility, while letters stand for culture, form and deed, or else the effect of the deed. White letters are rendered with the realised potentiality of the ductus of the grey canvas. The painter was in all of this led by an effective intuition (nothing to do with the feminine intuition of myth). This intuition is to be understood in the Aristotelian sense of a lucky or happy blend of instinct or perhaps along the lines of Bergson, who saw intuition as a flash of light in which reality is conceived and manifested as duration or durée and is expressed in all its primordial plenitude and wholeness. And so convinced and whole-hearted lauds to painter Anabel Zanze, whose white-lettered grey-forms are in fact animated and life-giving dead monochromes, in the depths of which ripen the tones of transcendental white silence, the meeting and merging place of bios, life in time, in which as earthly beings we shall sooner or later die, and zoe, the spiritual life, of and for eternity.