2011. FIRST LETTERS, SECOND LETTERS (1996-2011), Karlovac City Museum – Vjekoslav Karas Gallery, Karlovac

(…) Dadaist artists, in fact, by using letters devoid of all meaning, followed the principle of the absurd, of the alogical, the pointless, of things that since 1916 they had sketched out in their manifesto actions and programmes. Many years later, in the context of the neo-avant- garde movements of the 1960s, once again artistic production began to see the construction of text via the sequencing of letters as mere graphic signs devoid of all syntactic and grammatical values, the talk now being of visual or concrete poetry. The deconstruction of the word relates here primarily to text that has lost its meaning in writing. Contemporary Croatian painter Anabel Zanze appeared in the middle of the nineties, also using fragments of words, indeed, through the sequencing of letters, units were created that we do not experience as fragmented, often to the letters, the elementary building elements, or reduced literary production. We look at the works of this artist as paintings and the characteristics of paintings are recognised at all levels. In the mid-nineties the painter did numerous collages, and carefully built fragments of papers, journals and books into an imagined compositional framework. Printed material is important to her because of the letters, or really because of the monotone texture that results from printed words, sentences, major textual units. On occasion the semantic field that fragments of texts create might be broached, and legibility is to an extent possible, but from this reading nothing relevant is found out. Text, word and letter are reduced to raw material subordinated to visual effects: order, symmetry, relations of white ground and the pasted parts of a decomposed textual unit. Sometimes she adds drawing to the collage, a manual intervention as short account that also reinforces the impression of visuality. Another time, little parts of a picture are inserted into the text, the recognisability of it, however, being completely neglected, while it is reduced to the establishment of a new visual, or rather, compositional hierarchy. Anabel Zanze builds surfaces filled with meaningless texts, with the desire, though, that from their monotone sequencing some absolute mono- tony be created, and, as the ultimate objective, silence.

When in 1998 she started a series of paintings on which she wrote out letters, words, sometimes, sentences, running them into regular rows adjusted to the edges and format of the painting, the effects of monotony and quietness became ever more emphasized. (…) These paintings were freed of everything that implied representation and of even the slightest tint of narrative. Shards of verbal signs appeared in chained, rhythmically carefully harmonised sequences that referred to nothing real whatsoever. I understood these pictures as pictures of time: of the time inscribed into their origins. The great Polish-French painter Roman Opałka built the whole of his oeuvre by writing out numbers on the surface of the canvas. The numbers ran from 1 to infinity, the beginning being temporally determined (in 1965) and the end being left to fate, i.e. to the artist’s death in 2011. Opałka painted or wrote his numbers in white paint on a grey and over the course of time an ever lighter ground, which, towards the end of his life, became white. White on white enhanced the metaphysical resonances of these works devoid of representation, the pictorial, story, aesthetics. They marked the absolute absence of everything that belonged to the world of objects, the real world that is, but as substitute, offered time, which had become visible.

I mention the case of Roman Opałka in the context of the pictures of a contemporary Croatian artist because in her work I can see the crucial content as the presence of time. Time is inscribed in the dense, rhythmically regular repetition of letters, which describe nothing, create no verbal unit, but tell of the course of their creation. Anabel Zanze has inscribed herself into her pictures, has become at one with them. She has excluded from them all hints of other realities, and has maximally entered her own personal, extremely sublimated, reality, of that own time of hers consumed in the act of creation.