4 – 22. X. 2016 / Curator: Feđa Gavrilović / Set up: Anabel Zanze
(…) The evident painterly character of these works is what makes them different from the corpus of visual poetry. Anabel Zanze experiments with fonts and concatenation of letters into lines, separates words on the emptiness of the background, thus pointing out their peculiarity (in the cycle of smaller paintings on paper with different French expressions) but most importantly, they are subjected to the logic of painting, in fact they are required to have a composition. She accomplishes this by stressing the rhythm and by leaving blank margins on her canvases, which ruthlessly cut the letters when they run off their edges quite naturally, due to their construction. This has nothing to do with a part of infinity, with a pattern concatenating organically, which can be partially inspected (as is the case with numbers in Roman Opałka’s works). The composition is closed and the fragment of text, copied by the artist, is defined by the border inside the square or rectangle of an image. This is a matter of magic, which is present in reliquaries as well, but this time it is a magic of two-dimensional presentation, arrested movement related to a hand applying oil on canvas. This magic is sufficient to convey the author’s understanding of painting as the possibility of levitation in a state devoid of the dependence on something actual, physical or casual. It is particularly interesting that, despite being drawn by the dematerialisation of content, Anabel Zanze, while defining the boundaries of her compositions, does not strive for infinity, which seems to have become the in motto. Her faith in the discipline of frame is to a certain extent faith in painting as an art form, rejection of irresponsible and inconsiderate attempts to overcome it, which are being made by numerous contemporary artists of similar poetics.
Scratched, stained, anthracite backgrounds on which words are written remind us of the fact that her works of art are hard work indeed. The words appear as if they were emerging from the fog, as clear concepts from a multilayered, sloppy tradition of painting; the words and the art form are dynamically counterbalanced, while simultaneously complementing each other. Sowing (Seminatio) and Harvest (Récolte) are titles of two paintings and the only words written on them; they remind us of a cyclic change that can be compared with the change from the mental and the conceptual to the physical and the material. This phenomenon has been experienced throughout the history of visual arts, as a change of the governing paradigms of creativity but even to a greater extent and more dramatically in particular creations (numerous works by this artist are among them), which manage to express the nature of painting through this change.