2016. [FIFTY EIGHT PAINTINGS], Vukovar Municipal Museum – Oranžerija Gallery, Vukovar

(…) In its very title, Two Essays evokes the work of the Art & Language group. Terry Atkinson, one of the frontrunners of this group of conceptual artists, in the editorial of the first number of the journal Art-Language, presents the essay as a possible work of visual art. Although in Zanze too what we have is a standardised written form, her essays are not shaped as the theoretical views of the painter, in which the semantic coexists with the visual at the same or at a higher level. Indeed, by writing them out directly onto the canvas with her own characteristic typography, Anabel gives them an exclusively painterly dimension. (…)

(…) In the spirit of Dada, her painted texts can be understood as anti-texts as well. While Tristan Tzara and a people of a like mind foregrounded the phonetic and not the semantic dimension of a poem, necessarily a spoken poem, Zanze insists on the visual and not on the semantic level of the text, which is necessarily written out. Just like Tzara’s recipe for written poems, in Instructions II she gives her own, as it were, recipe for writing a painting, writing out, if not completely continuously, the text: INSERT SOME LETTER AND SOME INVENTED [ONE] THAT HAPPENS WHEN A LOSES ITS CONCEPTUAL VALUE.

Not all the works that can be found in the oeuvre to date of this painter are founded only on the dense texture of writings. In the cycle Figures and Double-Faces, words are primarily there for the purpose of a dichotomous designation of drawn visual forms. This is particularly visible in the works arc/fer, éléphante/table, torse/habit or Trône et Débâcle. The meanings of selected words from French in these cases overlap with the shapes assigned them in which the individual words are indited. Indeed, reduced to the basic visual fact arc and fer (horseshoe) are not distinguished in the drawing. It is the same with elephant and table, with torso and habit. In throne and debacle, at the visual level, there is a noticeable relation of opposition expressed in this case in the conjunction et / and, for debacle is shown as an inverted throne. In this case, then, the meaning of the words used is inseparable from their visualisation. A dichotomous relationship is also inscribed into the paintings Seminatio and Récolte. Sowing and harvesting make up a rounded cycle of giving and receiving. The seed that falls on the good Ashy Soil promises abundant yields (Mt 13, 4-10) for ash is not just a source of fertility but also protects the crops. Since Zanze once selected gris cendré as metaphor for her own work, her artistic fertility, in which text of a cultivated typography remains the basic visual circumstance more or less liberated from its semantic basis, is not at all surprising.