2015. CITATIONS, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik

(…) While the starting point in the work of Darboven, who went to school in Hamburg, and in the sixties spent a short time in New York, making the acquaintance of the Minimalism and Conceptual Art of Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre and Joseph Kosuth, was in visual art and in music (in her youth she was a pianist and composed to the end of her life), in Zanze the points of departure were visual art and maths. She graduated from mathematics high school in Dubrovnik and then from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the socially and politically agitated nineties, and in art grew up on Neoconceptual practices and relational art, which in this country „thrived“ on the principles of the New Art Practice of the seventies. (…)

The frame and format, and particularly the support, are of great importance for the performative of the painting. She defines in advance a spare register of colours, ranging from white to black, with ivory shades, tones of ochre and sandy-grey, most often testing out the properties of the support, its unexamined features: overpainting, scraping layers with an unconcealed palimpsest effect, and allowing unexpected blotches and mistakes to appear on the ground, which she then adopts and incorporates into the body of the painting. It is in this that she is a pedigree painter although some of her teachers at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb held it against her that she dampened her expression and spontaneity, features that were visible in her school and youthful works (Bulldog, 1997). The expressiveness practiced today is of a second or a higher order. One the one hand she makes a transit into kineticism or para-kinetics, a concept that she herself uses. On the other, a trace of action millimetre-fine can be discussed, the writing out of letter after letter, line after line, which requires the immersion and effort of the whole body. (…)

(…) But geometry, however arbitrary and free-handed, cannot be bypassed in the interpretation of her paintings, for several reasons. It is at the opposite pole to that of „mental images“. Periodically there is an interest in a geometrical stratum that dominates the other elements, but no shortage of text. One of the most important geometrical figures is undoubtedly the square, the stability of which she constantly tests out (see Square: coming into being and giving up, 2008 – 2010), and in the series of paintings named Labyrinth (2009, 2010). Although the painter herself doesn’t think of the Labyrinths as paintings of a geometrical organisation, her attitude or respect for the heritage of EXAT 51 is clear, and in the painting r-word (red) it is possible to talk of a link with the New Tendencies and kinetic art, particularly with Vadimir Bonačić.

She gives equal importance to the triangular division of the square (the series of double-large Black Figures, 2010), the surfaces of which, thanks to lines of letters of different directions and perspectives, become both continuous and discontinuous writing tablets. There is still greater freedom in Triangles (2009, 2011) and in Compositions with White (2009, 2010) in which rectangular fields are dynamised with triangular and pyramidal text-shrines. Spinning and turning, the mechanical and ludic components are present in the Rubik cube motifs, and the kinetic vibration particularly comes to the fore in paintings such as Fields (2008), Lacunae (2008) and Small Lacunae V (2009). (…)

(…) The mysteriousness of the diversity of individual sequences of images of this contemporary Croatian artist lies in the skill of showing the silence of emptiness. Zanze ontologically writes down, with the industrious patience of the scribe, the clear and cold truth, which she endows with the possibility of quiet reading. She puts simulated emptinesses in the way of knowledge. Every work is a fragment of the representation of nothingness.

She states the idea of the possibility of freedom, of both the one (letter/word) and the many (the text), abstinently refraining from the superfluous. The oversaturation of reality with content and the way towards moving away from its very self, is the need for every individual. In the silence of the work and in the manner of Zen thinking, the author paints the possibility of standing aside. She describes how to take the heaviness away from the present and how to accept the truth of the journey and the point of being.

Unobtrusive quiet transparency is always present as a profound ritual of action; as territory of possible answers and all forms of knowledge of self and the problems rooted in contemporary life.

(…) The work of Anabel Zanze and her use of text as the main content of the image, as well as the manner of writing on the canvas with a pen dipped in oil paint is often in art criticism compared with the procedure of the medieval scribe, primarily because of the hand-writing of words in a lengthy, laborious and physically demanding business. It is enough to recall the medieval saying Tria digita scribunt sed totum corpus laborat (Three fingers write, but the whole body works) for the analogy to be complete. The comparison confers on the artist an aura of ascetic, monastic discipline and, not without foundation, invokes worlds completely at odds with the scrambling and raucous era in which we live. On the other hand, however much she and the medieval scribe are connected by the depleting mode of work, and in a visual sense, the relationship of text and support, height of lines, type of letters, the key difference between the two principles in which text is reproduced is the fact that deviation from the norm, so undesirable on the part of the scribe, is one of the chief means of expression in Anabel’s pictures. Irrespective of the text or font she chooses, or creates, the artist never lets uniformity take over the role of principal vehicle of expression but with slight departures in the spacing of words and letters or by the occasional thickening of the curves of the body of the letter stresses the interplay of sign system and support and draws our attention to the physicality of the letter. At the same time, she has developed a very particular intermittent rhythm that, in my opinion, attains its most exuberant form in the cycle in which the artist takes up the practice of rubricating, and in a cycle of paintings with the motif of lacunae / empty spaces. In the cycle Rubricating (2010-2011), which in its very name recalls the rubricator, the scribe or illuminator who in the medieval workshops was charged with writing the rubrics (headings or feasts, depending on the type of codex), the artist accentuates one letter or one word in red, imparting to the very canvas a shifted rhythm, creating and complicating the dynamics between surfaces and levels – supports, depiction of text and the emphasised portion of the text. In the Lacunae cycle, the layering of levels of depiction achieves a masterly form, the combination of full and void giving the picture a totally new and almost plastic property. (…)

(…) The geometrism in the final visual perception of Anabel’s works is beyond question, but at the same time it is softened and modified by the text. In the Blocks cycle, for instance, the geometrical component stems from the author’s thematization of the page set-up, horizontal or vertical, columns, margins, always reserving the possibility of slight deviations, such as, let us say, the mirror depiction of the text in the painting Two Essays (2005), which signals another level at which the work is to be read. Only her signature, which in a perspicuous manner, often together with the name of the work and Roman numerals, she mimics in the text remains unaltered. (…)

(…) In this exhibition Anabel Zanze has shown, among other things, the unsustainability of any kind of prejudices in relation to the reception of contemporary art. Although the first impression of her paintings of letters is of hermetic and sophisticated formations that like riddles are only to be unravelled by professionals, art critics and historians, at the opening of the exhibition the visitors, of various ages and affiliations, young and mature and people getting on in years, looked and commented, held lively discussions and genuinely perceived her works. From the remarks of the children that the paintings were pretty to the frequently debated topic of whether the whole of the text needed reading and whether the order and the austere concept of the paintings were a brake upon their painterly nature, all these heterogeneous remarks actually certify the authenticity of Anabel’s painterly path and the high level of energetic impregnation of her works that work unerringly on observers, from whom reaction is both required and attained.