Volume 89, Number 7

ELENA SISTO
Damon Brandt

Elena Sisto has consistently explored the psychological power of images. The small canvasses she showed here were more modest in scale, yet more ambitious in conception, than her previous paintings of landscapes. Sisto's new works are also more self-consciously theoretical, but by abandoning landscape conventions the artist has also freed herself to use images in ways that tap personal feeling. If they initially seem idiosyncratic, taken together they suggest a sustained engagement with larger themes.

While her methods recall collage, Sisto is more attuned to painterly values than most other image appropriators. Her images are rendered with individual attention, set out as carefully as specimens in a display case. When she appropriated the image of Donald Duck--who becomes a caricature of the male type--he is treated in varying contexts with subtle changes in color and brushwork. The playful spirit in these images of childhood and adolescence is constrained by an underlying tension. Sisto is a stern mother--there is something poignant in her figures' isolation against the white ground of the canvas, something pitiless in their exposure. She is also, in her patient rendering of rows of buttons or shoes, a still-obedient daughter. Images of spiders or firecrackers suggest latent guilt and hostility; the working out of such conflicts underlies her personal involvement throughout the painting process.

Sisto's cartoon characters are also self-images, figures of the artist as public performer, engaging with personal issues in a public arena. Many paintings address anxieties about performance, fear of rejection, or shame. This frankness lends her work its often startling expressive force. If her introspective stance can tend toward the dry and clinical, it can also release unexpected resources of feeling, such as the ambiguous, disembodied grin that haunts several paintings. When she succeeds, Sisto conjoins postmodern self-consciousness to a release of suppressed emotion.

-Hearne Pardee
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This pleasant season's-end exhibition presents small drawings by Elena Sisto and photographs by Peter McClennan. Ms. Sisto's drawings have the presence of paintings; their surfaces are concentrated monochromes that seem boiled down from larger works. Their pale colors cover images lifted from cartoons and comic books. The scenes behind the colors are hard to read, filled as they are with intimations of violence, hilarity and personal strife. Looking at them is a little like hearing a fight in the next apartment. The mind struggles to pin down the narrative, but can't. Two things remain: the essential mysteriousness of other people's lives, and the seductiveness of paint. For his "displaced portraits", Mr. McClennan takes photographs of homeless people as they sleep on city benches and streets, and then inserts their forms into photographs of peaceful natural settings. These range from a surface of giant leaves and couchlike bushes to a desert oasis. The images are both funny and sympathetic. It is as if Mr. McClennan's subjects have dreamed themselves into more accomodating surroundings.

-Roberta Smith
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