2019. TEXT IN TENSION, Glyptotheque HAZU, Zagreb

(…) Over the years, lots of things in Anabel’s work has reminded me of weaving, of a text that emerges by “knitting” and whose fixed and readily available aids do not guarantee absolutely anything. Persistence is the most obvious gender-related link. Weaving implies binding, with the threads connected because they cannot function separately, each for themselves. And even though in many examples the painted words of Anabel Zanze function as isolated characters, without noticeable syntagmatic or paradigmatic relations, control over the surface that must be first conceived, just as a textile object must be first conceived and only then realized, belongs to the woman’s domain. Image as an articulation of language is also typical of other women artists whom we encounter in different parts of the world. Some of them have indeed brought their practice down to weaving, often suggested by the text: thus, Marie Lai has created a powerful non-semantic script by using threads. And it also functions, like Anabel’s, with the help of introspection, a methodological tool that necessarily rests on subjectivity. Lai creates illegible texts by linking words with entangled threads that seem like remnants from a tailor’s workshop. Both Zanze and Lai thus explore collective memories, whose ultimate visual recording is, in fact, abstract and only maps a part of the text or an isolated word. Zanze’s code is illegible, same as that of Marie Lai, whose textual seams, instead of reading as such, primarily indicate thirst for knowledge of what we know nothing about. With Lai, an important element is the tradition of oral literature, the transfer of knowledge that has often come about owing to women (the mother tongue), who learned to be patient and persistent, left to the rhythm of sayings and silence, perpetually alternating.

And while I am rounding up this hint of reflection on the gender-based position, Anabel takes out her drawing Perpetuum mobile from 2008. It is unusual, like an intruder in this devotedly written opus. Its origin is fictitious, although it resembles a possible machine. It derives from her research of graphic tools, a technical encyclopaedia in which she finds tools that she will sometimes use in her work, or just “mention” them in a drawing. The machine reminds of a printing press, one that is never turned off, but constantly prints news, good and bad lines. To the left of the machine, there is a meandering ribbon, and to the right a wheel reminiscent of Man Ray’s points to the time placed in a circular frame. As an experiment, we placed several smaller drawings next to the Perpetuum mobile, a group of graphic tools – knives, scrapers, awls, and all sorts of other wonders that can cause great damage in unskilled hands. (…)

(…) Before she finally enters the text, Anabel writes binary codes, zeroes and ones, on her paintings; after all, they are the text in which the relationship between the two digits generates information. In the beginning, these binary codes were written clumsily, almost with a child’s handwriting, and the paintings end with a little mocking song: Lalalalalala… This was followed by namings and textualizations of the painted field, which after a few years the artist limited in terms of tonal value by using sand paper. She uses scratching procedures, greying the surface (it is difficult to surpass the melody of grisailles), scraping and erasing in order to say something or to achieve a surprising pattern, to raise awareness of what an image is and what we are in relation to it. Sometimes she reaches for Magritte’s paradoxes, or at least it is on this trail that her paintings can be read where in renamings she enters the psychological spheres that she usually does not talk about. The tautological strategies are noticeable in a series of smaller black-coloured fields in which she repeats what she has already determined by colour, at least to some extent. Tautologies correspond to the character of monochromes, which prove the truth without transmitting information. Sometimes they are deficient or left to infinity, which the artist indicates by the letter n, remembering the learned school material. Somewhat later, she established dialogues with other artists through her paintings, patiently and with lots of understanding, some of which may have taken place in reality, while others have remained in the form of signals in paintings. Or realized through colour, such as Martek’s red, which she also marked in her notebook-archive where her materials reside.

Her choice is logical, firmly grounded in language as a signal. Because “This is how these words are used. It would be quite misleading, in this last case, for instance, to call the words a ‘description of a mental state’. — One might rather call them a ‘signal’; and we judge whether it was rightly employed by what he goes on to do.” (Quote: Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Accordingly, I leave you to judge by yourself.