On the precipice of despair, forlorn and surrendered in fear, one attempts to yield to the all-encompassing light. Such are the effects of Anziska’s paintings.
Full of ambient light and childish antics, such opposites seem to fill the spaces and take form and colour in her paintings.
In this sense the same ethereality that pervades her earlier work continue in these more recent ones, yet there is something new.
Perhaps that newness is the more direct and somewhat freer mark-making activity. This translates as a philosophical state of ease, a recognition that there is no monolithic, all-pervasive aesthetic and that therefore it might make sense to mix styles, that is sign-making activity.
Some of these mixing of languages is evident in paintings where scribbles, haphazard words in English, rough areas; drawn faces are x’d out or half erased; angelic forms and the basic language of the very elements of art combine to produce quite curious and interesting objects qua paintings.
There is an almost unfinished quality to the work, as if time is of the essence.
This urgency coupled with measured squiggles resembling figures or at least some organic form suggests at once a consciousness that wishes to rise above the humdrum and a sense of the mundane and the physical textures of life.
For surely it is only the latter that can give depth to the more metaphysical dimension of life.
In this sense, while logic and reason is king, experience and immersion in the material world is the very juice and heart that allows the logical gates to filter, squeeze and give forth.
Another way of saying this is that art is like a small, very fine rider, it provides just enough reason co-joined with the spirits of the unconscious, the intensity of emotion and the potential madness of the imagination spewing out image after image.
Then we are restored to equilibrium when colour speaks louder than her words, scribbles and representational elements.
Perhaps one may surmise that science works just the opposite: much reason and logic and enough imagination (signs) to connect the theory in a rigorous way. Wendy Anziska, I would suggest, in the quirkiness of including clues of contemporary society together with the ethereal, that is the empirical world of sense that science can understand with the nonsensical, the emotional, the unconscious seat of desire.
In this way, a painting becomes a world. A world that acts as a vessel for the thoughts and the emotions of the creator.
This coheres with Leo Tolstoy’s expressive theory of art, namely: can a work of art cause in the viewer a requisite or similar emotion to that of the artist who is supposed to have felt as such?
The problem with this argument is known as the intentional fallacy, which in a nutshell is that the idea that meaning, and the true one at that, of a work of art is somehow known to the artist or intended to be expressed as so and so in a particular work of art, is a fallacy.
It may be that there is a collective order that overrides individual will.
In this sense one gets a sense from the artist via a few discussions that she is very much at home in the visual language and the quality of paint and gesture and struggles to find a verbal correlate.
This is understandable, for if one could simply write about one’s concerns and impressions and so on, there would be no need to make art.
Yet while words may heighten and describe and do a host of other useful tasks, the revelation of a sign, a symbol, a visual token, is itself a language of massive import.
It galvanised Western Europe in the form of religious art for hundreds of years.
Yet one senses in Anziska’s style an African heartbeat.
I base this on a stylistic observation of her pattern-making or design.
For it is in that geometric sequence that both order and meditation become possible, an order that is inclusive of a modicum of chaos and chance.
Anziska has exhibited widely and her work can be seen in public and private collections.