2004. PAINTINGS, COLLAGES, DRAWINGS 1992-2004, Art Gallery Ćimić, Dubrovnik

(…) And when she turns to oil paints too, Anabel preserves the primary graphic relation between black and white; in most cases there is black script on a white ground. This script – literally too – creates letters. They are at first simulated, distorted, in some way combined; with repetitions and mistakes; mixed up, inverted, pointless. Afterwards the lettered whole – for the first time we can talk of texts too – will consist of copies, only (sometimes) a little bit shifted, chipped or grazed (on occasions) at the edges, more or less exact; these are copies of critical texts, mainly music reviews in Italian. More than to others, copies of Jazz, CD Clasica, Amadeus and Arte found their way to her hands. I asked once: „Why Italian exactly?”. She answered: „Partly, by chance. Partly because my friends sent me them. Partly beacuse I liked the typography and the design.” And I asked: „But the language?” She replied: „The language is not important, I didn’t know Italian. I had no particular attitude to the text. The content, in fact, didn’t interest me. I looked at the textual model as a form.” Still, some room is left for speculation on the topic: the letters (that we know), arranged into words that we don’t understand and the impenetrable words linked into unclear, inextricable sentences and, finally, heaps of enigmatic sentences in texts that, in themselves, are coherent and correct, but to most of the readers untransparent, and all that in the language of a great culture and tradition, ancient, perfect – long perfected – and certainly legitimate in the European family of languages, culture, science, politics and diplomacy. But what does this mean to someone who does not know it – cannot read or write or speak it – however many other languages he or she might perhaps know? It can be seen, from this example, how even familiar systems can be decontextualised, deprived of meaning, put into a state of dysfunction. All this is still more obvious if the language of a much smaller national grouping is used, one with a less distinguished place in the history of linguistics, literature, civilisation. Even more so if it does not use the Latin script. The first subversive hold-up will occur when the artist decides to slip in among the codified letters some that are made up. All this forces us to think over how communication systems – such as scripts, for example – do not necessarily have to subserve the establishment of channels of communication or perhaps, as can sometimes be established in particular circumstances, these channels are deliberately evacuated or used in such a way as to produce only noise or disturbance. There is still one further possibility: instead of a) primary communication and b) disturbance of communication c) altered communication can be set up, in which instead of a strictly codified system (script-semantic) a much more flexible and certainly less precize and indubitably more irrational, expressive manner for the transmission of content will start working. This happens when – in the interpretation of the artist – the letter A loses its conceptual and sonic values of the A and turns into a squiggle, a curve, a broken line or complex of lines, when a page-length block of text ceases to bear, translate or emit certain meanings, a certain sense mediated by conventional signs and is turned instead into a fact of visual art, a dark rectangle of strokes and lines (scrawls and patterns) or a lighter background. In this expressive type of communication the light or the empty has in principle just the same value as the dark or the full.

After that, instead of Italian, Croatian texts occured and, with them, the possible calcualtion about an ambiguous combined system, conceptual and expressive, although only perhaps in the local Croatian setting. But in this solution too the visual sign is privileged over the conceptual (and the copying out of a word will be halted in mid-word if the contour of the figure filled in with letters so requires), though there is still the possibility of interpolating some other story, the incorporation of some other consideration: that which adds something to the reader of texts, without depriving the observer of figures of anything.