2008. [UNTITLED], Zlati Ajngel Gallery, Varaždin; Cultural Center Čakovec, Čakovec

(…) We can recognise the wholeness of a part of the artist’s being primarily in the means she almost always uses: the Gutenberg graphic chord, the relationship of black (colour-non-colour) and white (ground). Consistently, like a printer of old, on white, light yellow or parchment-toned pages, she sets her black text, grey or dark, warm or cold, hand or machine-written. When she applies colour to the primer-prepared canvas, she will use warm zinc or cold titanium white; when she writes or paints her textual ornament, she uses two blacks: ivory black (Noir d’ivoire) or lamp black (Noire de bougie). Just as in order for it to be easily flowing she dilutes black with double distilled turpentine, saffron or poppy seed oil, so she will warm up the white with small quantities of darker yellows or ochres (Jaune brillant foncé, Jaune de Naples foncé, Ocre jaune clair). On top of this basic chord of light and dark (white and black, off white and grey-black) that more severe, organised and conceptual figure of Anabel’s painting is built up. This means, essentially, letter-pages, painting-texts. Initially, these texts were quoted only as visual art forms; especially in the collages, in which scissors, if needed, brazenly encroach into the textual weave. In the choice of texts, which are not used as possible transparent messages, the content stored in the words of this or that language has a smaller role than the quality of the paper the text is printed on, its colour or tone, the available font; everything that was once comprehended in the phrase typographic handling of the text or typographically treated paper or other support. This was the point of the mainly used foreign-language excerpts from journals, because the original meaning of the text was at a remove from most of the viewers; this made it easier to experience the textual fragment inserted into the collage as a purely visual circumstance. Recently Anabel has shown a certain selectiveness in the choice of texts, a reliable indication she has started to accord them greater significance. It is notable that since quite recently all the writings have been in Croatian, whether originals in or translations into Croatian. In other words, they were available in Croatia, and there for the reading. However much many people today have a command of some foreign language or languages, texts that in some or other of them are written, copied out, cut out of the printed page and put into the picture, pasted or paraphrased, for most of the public for the visual arts, they have remained alien, in principle unintelligible texts. With the use of the Croatian language in her paintings, she has created a feeling that full communicativeness has been facilitated at another level too, not only visual but also textual. She has thus achieved transparency for the text, additional functionality. The selection of a literary or a journalistic original has become more responsible, more subjective and certainly more committed than before. Appearing on her canvases as pictorial motifs are fragments of writings of Željka Čorak, Josip Vaništa, Antoaneta Pasinović, Roland Barthes, Leonida Kovač, Anaïs Nin and many other contemporary writers. But one should not necessarily, in spite of any excellence the fragment written out may have, look for places of any particular messages from Anabel, for the messages that these fragments probably bear, even when plucked out of a whole, are the messages of the actual writers. For Anabel these citations are just pages from her reading diary. Although: who could take away the sense of these quotations / contents as something quite coincidental, unimportant for the painting? For they are the painting. This assures them privileged status in the analytical assessment of the work. It was different in the 1998 to 2000 period when Anabel collaged or copied out, in writing or drawing, fragments from Italian music criticism that in fact she did not understand. For her they were exercises in texturology, even if very subtle ones. It is also interesting that in an impenetrable foreign text, the valorisation, indeed: the individualisation of some of the letters or lines took place in the uneven density of blackness, in the variously thick lines as well as in a kind of modification of some of the signs. Now the writing out is calmer, more precise, more uniform; in places one might think that the texture is some kind of enlarged typing. We can conclude that the écriture has been made objective; but has the picture too? (…) Confirming that her painting has not been numbed by the objectivity is the occasional slip of the pen, the deliberate replacement of some unacceptable word with another, acceptable, the interruption of textual continuation for some priority, i.e., painterly, reasons, breaking up words at the end of the line without the expected continuation in the next, and many similar procedures, which seem fickle and unjustified, but in fact demonstrate the painter’s personality: a young woman who will accept nothing with her eyes closed, nothing ad litteram, and one who is not a mere copyist. (…)