2009. [UNTITLED], St Krševan Gallery, Šibenik

(…) Now stronger, now weaker, once again and more extensively, then again quieter and more sparingly, from drawing to drawing, painting to painting, collage to collage and in a plurality of artistic procedures, materials and aids: in pencil, charcoal, ink, paint, in scissors and paper, this curve runs from cycle to cycle, meandering as a firm link in the work of this intriguing artist. And so, it is not even slightly accidental, that this characteristic of hers should have been compared with great predecessors, with the classics of contemporary art, both those who have left a permanent mark on the world’s art scene, and with those who have defined contemporary Croatian art. There has been particularly much talk of the tangency between the work of this young artist and the huge oeuvre of Knifer, to mention just the first among equals, of the definition of what their points of contact are, not thematic, morphological or stylistic, but primarily from the viewpoint of that unique persistence in the consistent realisation of their own visual concept, as the meeting point of two facts in visual art. (…)

The shifted and dislocated fragments of literary and critical texts that Anabel Zanze presents as pictures (heightening the paradoxicality of her procedure by using a technique that harks back to tradition, oil paints on canvas) break up the narrative in its logical organisation at three levels, as defined by Tzvetan Todorov: 1) the proposition, 2) the sequence and 3) the text, thus reinterpreting and calling into question the heritage of writings we are apt to accept unquestioningly as givens in, and the foundations of, modern thinking in the West. With an about turn in the procedure of citationality (with visual manipulations of the textual tradition [literary and critical]), Zanze makes the material she is working on additionally strange. The frequent use of precisely literary originals is the consequence of the long-since established special relationship between literature and language and the structuralist proposition that the linguistic model (like all other human works) reflects the basic structure of the mind. Fragmenting the fragments she uses, the artist lays stress on the fact that these texts should be seen as parts of a greater structure and by a synecdochic procedure in which parts refer to the whole, and then, condensing meaning via metaphor, emulates the nature of dreams with the dragging of unconscious content into the realm of awareness. Lacan claimed that desire is an endless slippage from one signifier to the next in the wish to supplement the absence of meaning, which would lead to fullness of the real. The divided subject endeavours to overcome the gap that exists between the absence of complete meaning and the plenitude of the real. According to him, this subject is a permanently unstable entity, divided between the conscious life of the ego and the unconscious life of desire. Anabel Zanze breaks up the codes and brings in deliberate ambiguity to the assumedly existing structure in the system that is the ground of the reader’s act of interpretation. In this manner, in the spirit of poststructuralist theories, she vividly demystifies the scientific pretensions of structuralism, emphasizing the radical loss of centre, ontological uncertainty, the theme of the absent centre, and the lack of firm reference points by manipulations of fragments, which we can consider exemplary instances of a general text. Roland Barthes, in addition, talks of the freedom of the reader (viewer) as recipient of a message and points out that the meaning is not imposed by the author (structuralism actually proclaimed the death of the author). He goes on to say that pleasure is achieved when the reader is guided by cultural conventions to an understanding of the text, while by the rejection of the conventions in an anti-representational reading he or she arrives at a state of bliss. In this sense, Anabel Zanze treats the text not as readerly but as writerly, in the same way as the avant-gardes. Her procedures tell us that literature is to be understood intertextually in the sense of a network spillover from one text to another; she emphasizes the parallelism between language (words) and literature (literary texts). In this way, she recreates a known text through a radical reorganization that evades conventional identification and frees herself from preset perspectives in their decoding, the ultimate consequence of which is postmodern scepticism and relativistic understanding. If we employ Julia Kristeva’s interpretation here, what is rationally accepted (the object) through the medium of syntax is here threatened by the heterogeneity and irrationality that characterize desire. As previously mentioned, through such deconstruction of texts, the semiotic (the unconscious as an unorganized process of signification) transitions into the symbolic (as logical connection of signifying substance) in a process in which the subject finally acquires its identity. By disrupting set interpretations of discourse, a subversive openness of the semiotic is created, penetrating the boundaries of the social, closed symbolic order. The clearest statement about, among other things, the self-referentiality of Zanze’s procedure is present in canvases where the author rhythmically arranges the capital letters A and N (as AN[abe]), which by turning the second letter on its side, actually a strategy immanent to her art, can also be read as A and Z (i.e., A[nabel] Z[anze]).