Friday, December 4, 1992
Art In Review
Elena Sisto
Germans van Eck Gallery
420 West Broadway (near Spring Street)
SoHo
Through Dec. 23
Elena Sisto's lush paintings look like chunks of old walls on which
graffiti figures have been repeatedly drawn and erased until only
cryptic, half-seen fragments remain. Ms. Sisto continues to rely
on cartoon heroines to play out her allusive dramas, but of a distinctly
different sort than before. Where once Nancy, the no-nonsense protagonist
of Ernie Bushmiller's classic comic strip, took the leading role
in these narratives, Ms. Sisto now enlists a variety of female (and
a few male) characters, notably in men's magazines of the 1950's.
Richard Prince has used similar cartoon bimbos in his paintings,
but for very different ends. Where his deadpan images maintain an
ironic distance from their sources in popular culture, Ms. Sisto
focuses on the decidedly mixed messages of sexual power and exploitation
these cartoon characters offer women. These are beautifully painted
pieces, mostly in pastel pinks and blues, and now made with tempera
rather than oils. The scarred surfaces and expressive paint-handling
lend mythic overtones to the scenes. The fat snakelike form that
winds its way through"Eve"
(1991) evokes the primal skirmish between the sexes in the Garden
of Eden. Other works here suggest cave paintings, with the busty
heroines as improbable fertility goddesses.
CHARLES HAGEN
-------------
Modern Painters
Spring 1993 Volume 6 Number 1
Carol Kino writes of life and death in the New York art scene and
all the gore and violence in between
I thoroughly enjoyed Elena Sisto's work (Germans van Eck). Though
her paintings make heavy use of cartoon imagery, she certainly goes
against the current trend by treating this popular subject-matter
unironically. Her last show focused on childhood, using Donald Duckand
the well-known (in America) Nancy; now she's moved on to womanhood
and sexuality, taking bosomy '50s-era bimbos as her archetypes. I
remember, back in the deep past, a couple of books of such sophisticated
drawings on my parents' coffee table, and thesepaintings--with their
half-humorous assemblages of inflated-looking ladies tangled up with,
or presiding bustily over, mysterious serpentine shapes- pin down
precisely the sort of powerful subjects the originalsmade me wonder
about. These small, compact oils are so beautifully painted; Sisto's
expressively layered surface can look as much like cartoons (the
older sort) as scrawlings on a wall, striking an interestingnote
between found object and fine art
------
ArtNews
February 1993
Volume 92, Number 92
Elena Sisto
Germans Van Eck
In the past Elena Sisto has used the popular cartoon character Nancy
to represent herself as a little girl. In this show, Nancy appeared
only once. Sisto continued her obliquely autobiographical explorations
by using a group of less famous, though equally familiar-looking,
cartoon images to suggest a young girl's amazement and bewilderment
upon reaching puberty.
In these marvelously rich small works, done in tempra or casein,
images from 1950's cartoons simultaneously emerge from, and disappear
beneath, the sweet, appealing pastel colors. The females are mostlycurvaceous,
cheerful "bimbo' types, but there are other stereotypes of women,
including the spinster and the battle-axe wife-mother. Males are
present primarily as voyeurs--goofy young guys, physicians, or paunchy
businessmen with glasses. In Eeny Weeny Bit,one can see a guy with
martinis on a table, a woman being hit on the head and dragged away
by a caveman, and a prisoner hanging. Pink and Black has at least
three sets of doctors with glasses, each examining ahuge-breasted
woman. And in What to Want, the figure of a voluptuous woman opens
up into a pleasant, decorative, framelike shape. Eyes are everywhere:
men looking at women, women comparing themselves with other women,
and the implied sense of a teenager wondering who she is and what
she will become. Despite the variety of imagery, there is never a
clear narrative or message. The scale of images shifts dramatically
within a single work; and figures do not always follow the laws of
anatomy. Surfaces are jazzed up by decorative shapes: balloon-like
discs and bursts of color that fracture space, hide forms, and undercut
any quest for specific meaning. Yet each work is rich with humor
and poignancy, social commentary and camouflaged personal revelation.
-Ruth Bass
|
May 1993
Elena Sisto at Germans van Eck
Elena Sisto's new paintings have assumed a distinct political
content. While still drawing on the cartoon-type imagery she has
employed in the past, her new work has moved beyond the re-enactment
of her own sexual fears and anxieties to more topical and universal
issues relating to the male misuse and objectification of women.
To this emotional subject matter, Sisto brings a sense of reserve
and seeming detachment which allows for greater candor and more
impact.
All of the paintings in this exhibition operated with a certain
degree of irony. Painted in tempera on wood, and in colors confined
to soft, translucent shades of pink, yellow and blue, each panel
is pervaded by a jewel-like luminosity. To these rich and visually
seductive surfaces are added figures and forms which play out narratives
of sexual domination. In Eve, (1991), the prototypical woman is portrayed
as a cartoon bimbo straight out of pornographic magazines from the
50's. Juxtaposed to a colossal snake (which also doubles as a phallus),
she is all temptress, with bulbous breasts and exaggerated hips.
The same figures reappear in Oh! Doctor (1991), only here the snake
has grown even larger in size and the cartoon pastiche of woman as
vacuous-sex-object is conflated with the image of a physician, his
eyes aligned with the level of her vagina.
While these paintings playfully tease the viewer withtheir color
and radience, there is no mistaking Sisto's feminism. The alluring
washes of paint in these panels are cosmetic and contrived rather
thanthe outcome of any sincere and serious interest in extending
the language of painting. Along with Sisto's approriation of ditzy
blondes, these superficially decorative features are meant to call
into question the essentially male construction of art and beauty.
In What to Want (1992), a biomorphic, globular form (which looks
like it could have come from a painting by Carroll Dunham) is combined
with bits and pieces of female anatomy-legs and breasts predominate.
These fragments are either superimposed on one other or matched randomly,
as if to underscore the irrationality and emotional poverty of male
sexual fantasy. Another layer of meaning is also attached tothe seeming
chaos of these compositions: the disconnected imagery studiedly mocks
the stylistic features of the work of a number of male artists, such
as David Salle, who formed a current of art-world patriarchy.
Unlike other feminist artists such as Sue Williams who have taken
on issues of sexism and female subjugation, Sisto's painting is devoid
of rancor. While both artists have used the same bimbo-type charecter,
Sisto's approach is more analytical and intellectual. Her vantage
point allows for greater elaboration on the cultural and historic
conditions which have contributed to gender differences and the still-diminished
place of women.
-Debra Bricker Balken
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