18. V – 10. VI. 2006 / Curator: Željka Čorak, Milan Bešlić / Set up: Igor Zidić / Photo: Željko Kovačić
(…) Story, as embodied in the anthill of its particles, its sounds and letters, its groups of letters and words, lines, columns, is seen as image. But this lover of the paradox twists even this level of visibility of the story in various ways. The text as a whole is not presented at the conceptual level but in the frame of a page: that which has been borrowed, cut, edited and collaged. The meaning of script is subordinated to the role of occasional witness. Sometimes a foreign language will break free of the preconception of what is communicated, sometime a look between the lines will catch a phrase that points elsewhere, far-off. This is fortuitous, induced reading, a journey through the labyrinth of uncertain encounters with dubiously identifiable quotations. If the lines are corners, around the corner one might meet with a novel that comes down to, for example, “we are an honourable Protestant family”, without a backstory and with all possible variants of destiny… Anabel Zanze will sometimes treat the unfamiliarity and the strange appearance of text by writing it out in her own hand, again, in some kind of wonderful and innocent creation, with an amount of patience enough for the sacrificial act. Sometimes a block of text will be divided into columns and in it white passages will be opened up as in Knifer’s meanders, winding as they build a field of some organic Op Art. (…)
(…) In his foreword, Milan Bešlić has written about the way in which Anabel Zanze problematises the very medium of the painting, which can be inferred at first glance as well as in the tritest attempt at describing and identifying the artist’s interventions on the white surface of the paper, where we can say that she draws or writes on it, literally borrowing individual quotes from various textual sources. Naturally the primary effect of these interventions is graphic, inhering in the ratio of black and white, in the structure and dynamics of the individual signs, their multiplication, framing and in the disciplined hand that reproduces them. But they are also drawings that can be read at the level of actual content. Zanze leaves the viewer this possibility and indeed gestures towards it by the very choice of texts that she intends to reproduce in the medium of the painting or drawing.
This is not a matter of the mere collaging off material selected at random; we gather that many of the texts, or parts of them, are writings about painting, and so the problematisation of the painting mentioned earlier is actually reflected at the virtual level, imparting to a basically unbendingly serious and extremely reduced story a very mild component of self-irony.
Probably there was nothing accidental about the selection of a text referring to Julije Knifer. This reference is not an entirely unjustified reliance on authority, for it has certain foundations at least in the degree of spiritual discipline, the meticulous and austere drawing exercises of Anabel Zanze, and among the works on show, primarily in those in which she structures the text into columns it is possible to discern the occasional more direct quotation of Knifer’s meanders. (…)