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Text by Annekathrin Kohout
Pastel colours, rounded shapes, smooth surfaces, sexual allusions - Anna Nero’s paintings arouse desire through what they show. The interplay of rigour and playfulness, figuration and abstraction, extremely precise and gestural brushstrokes creates a harmony of contrasts.
But there is something else in Nero’s paintings that this harmony conceals on an aesthetic level and that prevents a pleasant or complacent effect. It arises from what is left invisible or not clarified: Whilst we are confronted with a suggestion of spaces and sometimes more or less obvious objects, i.e. we are given indications of a where and a what, however the who and the how remain unclear. Who inhabits Nero’s imagery? What are recognisable objects such as the dumbbell or rattle, the pill or the wire mesh used for?
These ambiguities make us nervous. They make us feel an omnipresent yet subtle brutality the origin of which is hard to pinpoint. It’s a bit like the beginning of a true crime series, as if we see images of a crime scene and begin speculating: What happened there? Why is everything here so clinically clean? What has been cleaned up? Are the objects props from a crime? Who did what to the rattle or the pill - and why?
The tension in Anna Nero’s pictures arises from the ambiguity of giving us many clues and contrastingly leaving us in the dark about any narration. It also arises at the moment when excited desire meets a dull, palpable threat. And isn’t that an equally apt description of our current emotional scenario, in which the omnipresence of soothing pop is accompanied by an uneasy and gloomy background noise? Is this not a fitting image for the pathology of the millennials - in whose generation a society of hedonism clashed with a society of control?
Nero’s artistic approach also contributes to this depiction of a sometimes contradictory emotional state: Her paintings are extremely controlled; even the supposedly gestural sweep of the brush is resolutely assigned a place in the strict, geometric constructions of her pictures. It is as if she were living out the pursuit of perfection and constant (self-)control in our place.
Ultimately, Anna Nero’s strict and controlled imagery inevitably also raises the question of power. While a critique of power traditionally goes hand in hand with the withdrawal of control and resistance through the undermining of it, the artist affirms power structures in her paintings by demonstrating control and simultaneously promising the possibility of being able to create or redistribute power.
It’s not hard to believe that Anna Nero is a ride-or-die girl. She doesn’t just seem to be unconditionally loyal to her fellow human beings or her community, but also to her art. And as much as the phrase symbolises a deep bond, it could also, depending on the context, resonate with a certain urgency or determination that could be perceived as threatening.