2021. [ANALOGOUS STRUCTURES], Art Gallery of the City of Slavonski Brod – Ružić Gallery, Slavonski Brod

(…) The cycle Analogous Structures, motivated by the energy of the exhibition space of the Ružić Gallery, consists all told of fifty-five square oil paintings in four sizes: four are 150 x 150 cm, seven are 70 x 70, four are 50 x 50 and forty paintings are 30 x 30 cm, the last of which are imagined in the set-up as two serried ranks in four rows and five columns. The artist carefully planned their distribution in the gallery space; even before she started the painting process, everything was designed down to the slightest detail and only then could the production begin.

(…) Analogous Structures, oil paintings on canvas belong as the painter calls them among Second Letters. They appear as a natural sequence to and cyclical alterations of First Letters, i.e. collages, which first came to light in 1996. These Letters are an early manifestation of her self-referentiality. Zanze used as the collage material the music magazines Jazz and CD Classica, evoking the classes in violin, solfeggio, and orchestra in the Luka Sorkočević Music School. But in this case in the transfer from First Letters to Second something new occurred: out of her previous works (Lexicon, Figures and Double-Faces, Ufemat I-VII, Fields) by picking out some of the fragments, she created out of them new units. In Analogous Structures she searches for strictly synthesised forms that, through a dialogue with Ružić, instead of her typical designed blocks of pages, turned into supports onto which she applies her picture-writing, her own typography. (…)

(…) The strength of her works inheres in the synthetic simplicity, and she creates her oeuvre consistently and authentically, purely and clearly expressing her painterly idea. All of this makes Anabel Zanze a painter of exceptional individuality in contemporary Croatian painting. (…)

(…) The Zanze pictures on show are not only form but also substance, the relocation of which from the mentioned (or any other) space would subtract nothing from the regularity of their effect as self-sufficient visual and linguistic complexes. For example, the work entitled Non-Babylonian Tower recalled to my mind a documentary in which the mingling of languages in the tower of Babel is interpreted fairly pragmatically: allegedly, during the building of the mythical tower, because the acoustics were poor, echoes were created, with the voices reverberating, and the builders for this reason being unable to understand each other. Is not Zanze’s repetition of one letter (a “d”) just this echo? Her appropriation is neither cold nor sarcastic. The artist does honour to the artists and artistic intentions that she has selected. Her works are in some sense paradoxical, a kind of amicable Dadaism, which is obvious in the concise, patient and deliberated performance. (…)

(…) At the end, I might conclude the following: her pictures are visually simple, but semantically saturated; they are, put Duchamp-wise, a transition from phenomenology to phonemology.