Anna Glantz

‘It’s getting grayer and gold and chilly’ is the title of the solo exhibition presenting works created specifically by Anna Glantz for Fondazione Bonollo in Thiene.

Suspended between abstraction and figuration, Glantz’s works elaborate forms through fields of colour and tonal variations to stimulate perceptions, memories and sensations. We discussed with the artist her approach to painting, the linguistic aspects involved, and the experience of encountering the artworks.

In the accompanying exhibition text, curator Elisa Carollo begins by discussing the void of creation and the blank space of the canvas as a catastrophe, where ‘form and meaning still exist in potential but has not yet been imagined’. How do you deal with the spectre of the blank canvas? Where does your imagination journey begin and what trip do images embark on before arriving on the canvas?

The blank canvas is great in the sense that there is infinite potential. As I make a painting, part of my goal is to try to hold onto this feeling of possibility and openness up until the very end. I’m interested in making a painting that has its own presence and quirks and yet still manages to allow for new thoughts; to be a starting point for the viewer.

I start the paintings very basically, by putting a lot of paint on the canvas without trying to anticipate what the end result will be. I don’t have an image or sketch in mind, but at a certain point, I like to find a structure and a sense of volume or orientation that gives the painting a solid integrity. Like many painters, I try to react in real time to what I see on the canvas—one instance leads to the next. Sometimes I recognize an inkling of something—a time of day, or maybe the sense of another era, something fancy or wet. I try to expand on these moments if they are interesting or surprising to me. The process happens over many months and feels a bit like manipulating a garment… a jacket that I can endlessly turn inside-out or cut a different neckline. The paintings come to an end when I feel that I’ve made something real—something that is perhaps confusing but undeniable, a conversational partner or companion. I think I would like for them to match the complexity and depth of a person—a person living today. This seems to be an impossible feat, but if the paintings can retain a sense of this possibility, if they can point toward this potential, then they’ve done something.

All the works presented at Fondazione Bonollo are untitled. They present fragmentary, dreamlike and suspended scenes. Compared to previous exhibitions, you have abandoned the support of words here. The curatorial text also mentions that in your work words linger behind the images. What relationship do the images you create have with words and titles?

I’ve always thought about painting as having structure similar to grammar. I find this to be true about architecture too — the chapel room of the Fondazione Bonollo has an exaggerated symmetry that reads like a bold exclamatory sentence. The language aspect of painting for me has to do with the relationships between parts and the rhythm or structure of the whole — the way one shape overlaps, or barely touches, or dominates another. When I make a painting, I move things around and edit out different sections in a way that feels similar to writing.

For this show, I decided not to include titles because they seemed to flatten the experience by closing off certain interpretations and propping up others. I chose to title the show, “It’s getting grayer and gold and chilly”, which is a line from James Schuyler’s poem “February”. I liked how “gold” could be mistaken for “cold” because of its proximity to “chilly”. It acts as a kind of hinge between color and temperature. I’m not sure how it reads in the Italian translation. The title seemed to blanket the show in a kind of weather mood while at the same time raising odd questions — how does it get grayer and gold at the same time? I hoped it might also be a subtle cue that the paintings can be approached poetically, and that there is no right or wrong answer.

It seems that your paintings wedge themselves between the structure of external reality and our perception; the act of painting is a cognitive process. These images construct meaning through association, displacement and recollection – a method quite similar to Freud’s description of the dream mechanism as condensation and displacement. What is the relationship between dreams and sensory phenomena in your painting?

I think that dealing with the material of paint forces us to confront the fact that we are also physical material, that we are in a body that is separate from other bodies. Painting to me is so much about the reality of this material, in some ways more so than even sculpture. The artist Charles Ray has written “Space is the sculptor’s primary medium, a fact so obvious that it is easy to overlook”. In painting, space is always solid material. When I was making the paintings for this show, I thought a lot about Canaletto’s Venetian landscapes — some of the airiest paintings I can think of. I love them because they are filled to the brim with space, like little crystal palaces of atmosphere, glass enclosures of sky and water. But even Canaletto’s air is incredibly physical — the brushstrokes of the clouds and sky are surprisingly thick and sometimes oddly diagonal. How is he able to make so much space out of a physical substance? Not only has he created air out of solids, but his paintings are roomy on a psychological level — he has opened a gap that didn’t previously exist and can accommodate new thoughts. Maybe the dream-like aspect of my paintings — the fact that they don’t quite settle into one image — is my way of creating space. It is not a crystalline container like Canaletto’s but because my paintings never quite resolve, they leave gaps and let in drafts of air.

You consider painting not as a form of representation, but as a means of revealing connections between vision, memory and language. According to the curator, it “aligns the mind with a wider universal consciousness”. To what extent are you interested in guiding the viewer and intervening in this journey from perception to cognition to image?

I hope that viewers will find their own meaning in my paintings, or perhaps that the paintings will remind them of something or start a chain of thoughts they might not otherwise have had. Outside of making the paintings and choosing how to display them, I don’t have a desire to guide the viewer’s experience or intervene. I hope this isn’t a lack of generosity on my part, but rather a trust that the viewer is able to think for themselves and doesn’t need to be told how to experience the work.

PHOTO CREDITS

Installation views, It’s getting grayer and gold and chilly, Fondazione Bonollo, Vicenza, 2025, photo Giovanni Canova