2022/2023. LETTEROCRACY, National Museum of Modern Art – Josip Račić Gallery, Zagreb

(…) With her gift for unobtrusive optical examination of the pictorial field Anabel Zanze questions the psychology of looking, visual peculiarities, laws and accents of her own mental, intellectual painting. Her image is an inner word, and the word is an inner image. This is then sifted through the conscious – unconscious optical sieve with impeccable manual workmanship, and then sublimated, ogranised and projected into measured verbal-visual systems through the artist’s awareness and objectivization of psychological impulses that define us as a species. The rational factuality of the image. The layers of the subconscious, feelings and intuition are behind, in front or within the imaginery armour of image-letters, words, sentences woven from the same stuff that the artist is made of. We are eyewitnesses of written corporeality; the spirituality of the artist’s being woven into the web of letters. In addition, Anabel Zanze is an outstanding draughtswoman, which only those who are intimate familiar with her oeuvre are aware of. We live in the age of iconolatry, which has been formed, since the advent od photography, in the general technical or contemporary digital image after the period of textolatry, materialised by the emergence of writing, and thus history and civilisation. Words are what separates man from nature. A turning point occurred in the 19th century with the invention of photography. Today, our senses are completely saturated as we stand before a mega-image composed of threads of fragmentary images that we are still able to process, to some extent, in what is essentially a visual culture. The predominance of hyperimages that nullify reality conveys an immeasurable amount of information that, from the dawn of the personal subconscious to the present moment, we have been unable to classify within our own memory folders. In a state of mass hallucination in front of the sacred image of capital transformed into a commodity, we are faced with and fully immersed into an audio-visual cacophony that we cannot even comprehend with our everyday gaze. With manual execution and resulting delicate aesthetics, Anabel Zanze adds loftiness to images and words, referring to the critical-creative tradition, but also the distortion from the historical avant-garde onwards (Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism). She is simultaneously a paintress, a writer and a scribe who, by printing her own typografic fonts, materialises thoughts. (…)

(…) From the first to the last moment of engaging with this text, about the marvellous little exhibition of Anabel Zanze in Zagreb this winter, I’ve been depressed by recollection of a gloomy paragraph (in the rest of the sanguine prose). If it could be scraped off the memory, as it can be from a piece of writing, I would keep it far away from the work of an artist who so well knows, respects, writes, and provokes, words. Does Anabel Zanze really need associations with far-flung fields for her work to be discussed intelligibly? She is an established artist with an identifiable hand and thematic framework. Her work to date has intelligently balanced innovation and consistency, is distinctive and referentially post, a conglomerate of text art and appealing pictorial/graphic solutions. But surely an artist who understands the verbal at an intuitive and at a learned level would recognise a theme in the new epochal crisis of the written word. Every time when I go back to the Josip Račić Gallery in my mind, in word or image, the same for Zanze, layer under layer, reflected from nine works differing in their motifs is a presentiment of a new turning point that we are perhaps even now going through, some ineluctable future in which words get the worst of it again. Letter by letter, this time more comprehensively, at the atomic level. About this too Anabel Zanze picture-writes in Letterocracy.

(…) Letterocracy is a coinage, “a term that notes down the development of fragmentedness”, its point being “that the whole is subordinated to the part, that the totality implies fragmentation, and that celibacy imposes partiality”, Zanze picture-writes. In the authoritarian lexicographic tone and font, in the central oil on canvas of the same name as the exhibition, as if from some info-point we read a definition of some new rule of letters. Conceptual panels were a part of the recursive conceptual works of Joseph Kosuth and John Baldessari, underneath them being a subtext of humour – which Zanze has in spades. But her theme is not concepts, rather words themselves, because of which this part of the farce with definition and dictionary is the more complex. Firstly, because she undercuts the authority of the latter with non-words/coinages (a dictionary only records and does not make a word or term). Secondly, because the game here is self-referential (does not mess with signified and signifier but with the existence of words as such). And finally, because in the dystopian scheme of things it is the dictionary that is the very last authority to which we will have recourse under the threat of verbal fragmentariness. A genuinely epochal drama then, with all its comedy and pathos, can be read off this canvas; we have had our eyes fixed on the authority of the wholeness of the old world, and it laughs at us and legitimates lack of wholeness. There is no doubt, however, that Zanze still treats the dictionary as an authority. “My world is inside black letters and pale-yellow supports” she says.

The other eight Zanze works picture-write scenarios and aspects of the potential or the erosion of the word and/or (for there are some with both) write creative and euphonious and laughable words of resolution. It is no longer a truism that pictures speak louder than words, the title of a painting of 2022, not even a cliché and it speaks nicely of neither one nor the other. For today, with an inverted play of words, a thousand random pictures, one so like another, say almost nothing, let alone a multiple number of words (AI already knows a lot about this). In the democratisation of the word, when we can do so much, often we often spell out nothing: “wastme” and “grhm” was written on the magnetic board that Anabel Zanze left for the public to interact with the show and lexical creation in the work Agora. As a woman of words, I thought, maybe I should try to improve the impression, so I wrote “pride” (instead of “paris”, for awkwardness and lack of means get in the way of imagination). Leaving the gallery, through the window I saw that my words were not good: “benvenuti”, the custodian of the show corrected them in a hurry. Avez-vous vos papiers? of 2016 talks of the authoritarian nature of words on paper; abuse of them means their devaluation (if we can cover up human degradation). My World and Interpreter on the other hand are shot through with optimism, inclusion and participation. The visual artist addresses the unsighted visually in Braille. Paradoxes are all around – words are scattered, Babylonianly unintelligible and yet give hope in existent and non-existent complex systems of words that we do not have to know to believe in the circulation of a good and important essence of things. Bring Back the Magnolia and Young Patrician Lady are two works in the similar form of lettered polyptych and context of civil activism that goes down smoothly; the first is as formally simple as the context of the other is more complicated. Bring Back the Magnolia is a red protest inscription while Young Patrician Lady is like some kind of absurd mise-en-abyme, each letter being composed of paper fragments of words that mean hardly anything. It is clear of course what can be said about that, and what the artist is saying.

Letterworld (2021), letterreflex, lettermessenger, letterproseon, letterlink, lettervalent, lettercolourblind, letteressayist, lettersonnet, lettercover, letterdada, lettermillennium, letterlook, letterise, lettercorrect, letterclass, letterstructured: these are some of the 198 words that she has created, calligraphed and released into our language. I’m going to adopt some of them and will be happy to letterproseon in some new text. Is there any better tactics in the face of letterocracy than coopting?