2024. [NON-BAR-RIER-S], Typhlological Museum, Zagreb

(…) She, then, does not want visibility in the art world, but the way she is, frank, empathic, open to new knowledge and encounters, she wanted to afford her pictures a different kind of visibility, offer them to those who are actually graced by a special visibility – visibility by touch.

And it is just with the exhibition in the Typhlological Museum that, by a careful choice of works from various periods of her work, like some kind of musically well-tempered mini-retrospective, the artist has decided to address the blind and partially sighted, not excluding the sighted, of course. Immediately before this exhibition came one entitled Letterocracy in the Josip Račić Gallery of the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb in 2022/2023, at which the painter, in works especially devised and produced for it, for the first time engaged in a dialogue with the blind, as audience that can with equal rights, sometimes even in a privileged manner, receive-translate-experience-transform visual stimuli through tactile and acoustic sensations or media. On that occasion she created works in Braille, Interpreter (2022) and My World (2022). Also in the Typhlological, she has gone a step further and created Frieze, in Braille again, in the form of the circumferential band around one of the load-bearing columns, in which she introduces herself, gradually bringing persons with impaired vision into her world. (…)

(…) Having made the small bronze relief My World (13.1 x 19.3 cm), at once solid and tautological, compassionate and absurd, receptive to the touch, but with a meaning that many cannot grasp, she identified and connected with those who read and understand through touch. With this minimalist gesture, using just two words written in Braille script, the artist epitomised the message of the entire exhibition. (…)

(…) One of the central pictures of the exhibition confirms that the art of Anabel Zane is essentially Conceptual in nature: A Picture Says More Than Words (2022). The title is identical to the words written on the picture itself, and the picture is a paradigm of all that we think of at the mention of the phrase Conceptual Art: emphasis on idea, mental approach, literalness, tautology, unprepossessing exterior, lack of vitality, domination of the message over the dryness of the execution… Or more precisely, everything because of which it was long ago said that Conceptualism was the nervous breakdown of Modernism.

This large, horizontal format black painting has just one line of text deployed in the upper half of the picture and consisting of small ochre printed Latin letters, where, thanks to some of the gaps between the letters, words appear that ultimately build a five-word sentence. The sentence can be read by all speakers of Slavic language, for others it will have to be translated. Unless we have got lost in translation, many of us will at first deconstruct the sentence A Picture Says More Than Words. For we often hear it in the world ruled by the image, while the word, and literacy in general, has hurtled down into the abyss. The value of the picture, even when it is a bare tabula rasa is never called into question. Sight has become the main tool of cognition to which all other senses are subordinate and can even harm if they question something that is obvious. It’s interesting that Zanze has used a more concise version of the phrase for her picture that doesn’t mention how much louder a picture is – louder than a thousand words – not wanting to haggle with numbers. Can a picture truly be louder than words? Especially if the question is posed at an exhibition in the Typhlological Museum. The answer the painter offers us in the form of a visually highly reduced picture-no picture says quite enough about the (pointlessness of) the question.

And to end, by way of a bonus, on the accompanying wall-projection, meant for the sighted, is shown the process of the creation of an Anabel picture, a video shot in the artist’s little studio. It depicts the unique process of the picture-writing of Anabel Zanze: a disciplined, devoted, laborious and repetitive performance, a slow movement forward and back, up and down, liberated from market pressures, trends and deadlines. The painter was videoed not by a professional but by husband and daughter, who are among the few privileged to have the right of instant access to this little workplace.

The video can also encourage us to compare the introverted and complex world of the artist with that of the blind or partially sighted. But just as the artist, steadily and with good reason, emerges from the ivory tower to the field of battle and refined engagement, so she calls upon the public, particularly those with impaired vision, to be open for an encounter with the unknown. It is also a call to all of us to prioritise the view from inside, which erodes the fixed partitions and barriers and has the potential to turn a world of impossibility into one of NON-BAR-RIER-S. Perhaps one day this syllabic gibberish might become a phraseme not of a politically correct vocabulary but of a dictionary co-composed with others, which will have the same meaning for all, both for those to whom it is given to be able to do and for those who are on the way to discovering all that they can do.

If those with impaired vision experience the worldly largely by touch, what can it possibly mean to mediate it to them? For the boundaries of the perception and understanding of the visual world are not exclusively individual, in the context of the individual’s capacities and moderate efforts, but are those which society sets up in the encouragement of other sensory capacities. Insufficient social inclusion and adaptation to everyday life are the difficulties they encounter. Still, a real motive for entering the world of the visual is given by the exhibition NON-BAR-RIER-S with works by painter and graphic artist Anabel Zanze that belongs to a cycle of the Tactile Gallery of the Typhlological Museum in Zagreb. The fifteen works are not only made feasible for people with impaired sight but prompt the sighted to become sensitised and see their own levels of literacy. (…)

(…) Verbal descriptions and hearing play an important role in the way the blind and partially sighted perceive the world. Along with works explained by the catalogue in Braille, Anabel Zanze has used the capacities of interactive technology, audio files of her descriptions of the works with QR codes… (…) A translation has also been done in small tactile graphics of visually attractive works of the cycle Figures and Double-Faces of 2017 to 2019 on show in which she refers to artists like Ivan Kožarić and Joseph Beuys who belong to the same tradition, points out the contrasts and similarities of forms and black and white and above all the Martek red, as in Trône et Débâcle.(…)

(…) The core of it all lies in the oil painting with, written in yellow ochre letters, “A Picture Says More Than Words” on a black ground of 2022, in which the painter with marked self-awareness wonders whether a picture can speak louder than words when it itself consists of words, in the Typhlological Museum what is more. And only then when we take into account the look of the painting in the digital age. The borders of dialogue are also the borders of understanding script and language. The exhibition NON-BAR-RIER-S by Anabel Zanze for blind and sighted shows that for the integration of people with impaired vision, we are all required.