Schrey's drawings are visibly anchored in a current perspective: here, today. They assume their role as drawings by transmitting perfectly legible codes. Of course, the figure poses, but it is also and above all surrounded by numerous accessories (clothes, shoes, hairstyles) - a whole folklore that inscribes the work in a given time.
Such realism! This is the thought that comes almost naturally to mind when we first see Anja Schrey's colored pencil drawings. And indeed, the figure (like the artist, who appears on paper in ever-changing outfits and poses) looks strangely alive, almost tangible. Yet, despite their immediacy, these representations keep their remoteness. Despite their presence, in other words the effect produced by their hyper-realistic character, they remain distant. It is as if they retain a life of their own, which remains curiously out of reach, even on closer inspection. At first glance, everything seems clear. Obviously, Schrey is the keystone of this series of drawings. Made with colored pencil on paper, they show "portraits of Anja Schrey". The artist is not only the motif - the result of a pose and an outfit that combine to generate the image itself - but also the maker, insofar as she carries out the passage from the project of the image to its finished result, whose dimensions are very imposing indeed. This dual role is based on certain fundamental principles: the tradition of realism (the "classical" European concept of the reproduction of reality) is very important in the reception, and interpretative patterns emerge, such as the category of the "self-portrait".1 The observer, depending on his or her degree of anticipatory knowledge, may identify Schrey's particular presence through the larger-than-life realism, so to speak, of these portraits.
(...) Schrey's drawings are visibly anchored in a current perspective: here, today. They assume their role as drawings by transmitting perfectly legible codes. Of course, the figure poses, but it is also and above all surrounded by numerous accessories (clothes, shoes, hairstyles) - a whole folklore that inscribes the work in a given time.
(...) However, Schrey does not use clothes and styles only to facilitate identification. These elements propose in parallel, and in an indissociable way, a kind of highlighting of a chronology of "constructed identity". (...)
More and more, the appearance asserts itself as a deliberate way of insisting on the possibility of a central "self", expressed by its back and forth between a kind of exacerbated femininity and a pin-up attitude more wanted than mastered, or between an interloqued and haughty look and a withdrawn, calm and explicit state. As an aside: the interpretative model that we call legibility finds its limit here, in the very last place. It deploys a scene where to project...
(...) The drawing results from something other than the pencil stroke: the method is the one used to make an imagined image, developed upstream and remained detached from the "real" for a long time. This strongly limits the life of the work; the link between the figure and the support that makes it exist is more like the focus of a camera, so that the composition is subordinated to the framing. The contours clearly separate the figure from the background. (...) Each figure stands out by contrast, carefully and meticulously worked, with an almost didactic naivety. Isolated, solitary, disconnected, fixed on the crushing whiteness of the paper, the figure concentrates in the limits of the pre-histories which generated it, and freezes the extreme tension of an instant whose possible past and future life remains secretly and strangely tangible. The ultimate manifestation of its handmade surfaces, or better, of its hapten texture, takes place outside the painting. At a distance from the wall. The sheets are simply pinned to the wall with a few spikes, the difference in shade between the paper and the wall is almost imperceptible, resulting in a dangerous vacillation between the larger-than-life presence of the figures (whose rendering, in terms of light, shadow, height, contours and textures, is practically physical) and their way of floating, autonomous, in front of the wall from which they seem to be freeing themselves.
Excerpt from Hans Jürgen Hafner, Tableaux vivants, 2004