2024. ANABEL ZANZE (DUBROVNIK, 1971), Adris Gallery, Rovinj – Rovigno

(…) From the mid-1990s the first letters crept into her treasury of icons; in about 2000, they would become the characteristic letter-signs of the then Dubrovnik-based painter. Already positively intermingled in her were ancestral Konavle and Prvić Island impulses, some features that were inherited (character, nature, temperament), Dubrovnik impressions from childhood, from a hundred schools and classrooms, indoors and open-air (grade school, mathematical and IT-related, musical, choir, Linđo folk art group, ballet, training for various sports, camping, hiking, skiing; I would add in a close connection with Dubrovnik and nature, land and sea, pronounced sociability, alongside a need for solitariness and being alone). In the little girl the sociability was nurtured by school, and afterwards, in the teacher, by school again. When adult, she achieved solitude in her studio, before the canvases or at the drawing board with paper, ink, liquid paint, crayons. Then, already with a certain working experience in the painting and graphic profession, later in her work in teaching, with promising first appearances, with an armful of memories, with the initial transformations (of for instance letters into signs, signs into symbols, symbols into meanings), with an absorbed and inalienable literary heritage (which particularly enriched her language, talented attempts at writing in verse and later in rhetorical, and later still in critical, self-referential prose) – in 2004 she moved to Zagreb, or returned to it, with a clear path of her own, already foreshadowed in Dubrovnik. (…)

(…) The contacts, student houses, knowing the city and some of its institutions (libraries, theatres, cinematheques) made her return less stressful. In the meantime, after her graduation (February, 1996) she had lived in Dubrovnik not quite a year (then Maura was born), and in Split almost a year and a half, then again, from midway through 1998 to autumn 2004 in Dubrovnik. All this time she had, as shown by our enumeration, developed her expressive capacities from the little Squares to n, as well as the conceptual bases of painting that was transitive, mostly reductive and to an extent drawing on the work of the “historical avant-gardes”, actually Dadaism (Marcel Duchamp) and Suprematism (Kazimir Malevich).

It was with some small (22.3 x 16.9 cm) and large (100 x 70 cm) collages that Anabel inaugurated her picture-texts. In the big collages she fragmented the whole text into a textual mosaic; afterwards – in the paintings – into words and into individual letters and an individual letter (n, 40 a), at the end in Braille script (182 a) – as well, reciprocally, created an image of herself as “letter painter”. (…)