2000. SQUARES, Sebastian Art Gallery, Dubrovnik

(…) The newly exhibited cycle Squares comprises oils on canvas (rectangles in fact, of sixty and fifty centimetres) in which inhere both painterly and graphic expression, as well as the vision of the conceptual artist. The monochromaticity and reduction, important in the artist’s previous work here retain the constancy of coded language that takes on an ever more recognisable significance, but simultaneously metamorphoses from the previous shaping of the world as a circular sign system into the pervasive significance of the square. (…)

(…) Anabel Zanze fills in her squares with a brush stroke brought down to the formation of letters. The squares thus become complex coevally with architectural visions of voids and filled spaces from above, zooming in to cuttings of text, but with a referentiality that expresses the painter’s immersion in the world of contemporary media technology as well as her withdrawal from it: the letters reveal words in Italian that create textual fragments related to art, first of all the classical music stage, as well as a visual cognition of the world in the manner of the formation of scenes from a performative theatre presentation, in which every scene is of everyday life seen from the stronghold of emotional energy and reflective inwardness. Joining old fashioned calligraphy, imitation contemporary graphic printout, rhythmical uniformity of changes in the size of the squares and of the squares within squares and intersecting the textures of minimalist pictures contained sometimes in a single letter, Anabel Zanze creates an internal protest of the free human will in the world of meanings that may be forced on us by means of text, computers, the media, newspapers and in other ways, and that are in fact censored.