Littlejohn Contemporary October 10 - November 9, 2002

At Elena Sisto’s show of new paintings, entitled “Daughters,” one meets an extraordinary group of young women. Each painting consists of the life-sized image of a girl, somewhere around puberty, generally looking straight out at the viewer. Sisto sees these paintings not as portraits, but as paintings composed abstractly that turn into images of girls. Each girl wears a geometrically-patterned dress—composed of stripes, solids, or plaids. They can be reminiscent of abstract paintings themselves. The backgrounds are simple, almost monochrome—more atmosphere than background.

Sisto says this body of work is about the process of emerging as a woman, about the construction of an identity and the presentation of that identity to the world. The girls seem aware, to various degrees, of being watched. Some are almost guilelessly innocent. Others seem concerned with making the right impression, even aiming to appear seductive. “These characters are coming out of the private world of childhood,” says Sisto, “They are at the threshold of the public world, just becoming aware of things like sexuality and design.”

Observing the maturation of her daughter Clara, now 10, provoked this process of inquiry into the nature of personal growth. At the same time the paintings are a meditation on Sisto’s own past.

She insists the paintings are not narrative. They don’t intend to tell any particular story, but rather to be armatures for the imagination—to present the viewer with a receptive surface for contemplation. “I want to bring you back to the existence of the painting, the existence of the character, and the paint,” Sisto says. “I’m trying to get those three things working perfectly together and then to bring that paint back and forth between illusion and surface. When I’m painting a dress, I don’t think of painting the stripes of the dress, but rather the stripes of the painting.” Sisto is as interested in the composition of the overall image as she is in the figures depicted.

The characters are invented, not based on any real persons. “I put down a certain color and treat it as my light-space,” she says. “Then I start working with scale and placement, and gradually the figure precipitates out of that abstract approach. The light is what tells me who the character is, what sort of person she is. It might also be thought of as the gaze of the ‘other.’ The way the young women move in and out of the light reflects the degree to which they feel public or private.” These paintings put their subjects and the viewer into a shared social space.

When the figure begins to feel alive is when the painting is finished. Says Sisto: “I’m trying to create a figure that is evenly balanced between fiction and reality—that has the spark of life and the weight of life, but is not a copy of life.”

“Daughters” is Elena Sisto’s ninth one-person show in New York, and her third at Littlejohn Contemporary. She has won numerous awards for her work, including two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. She attended Brown University and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. She currently teaches drawing and painting at the School of Visual Arts, and lives in Manhattan.

For further information or visuals please contact Jacquie Littlejohn at 212-980-2323.