September 1990
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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Summer 1990
Elena Sisto
Damon Brandt Gallery
Elena Sisto's new paintings combine the media imagery of Pop
art with a luscious, painterly expressiveness. On small canvases,
each a foot or so square, Sisto bunches various image fragments
culled from sources ranging from comic strips to tromp l'oeil drawings,
against swirling white or pastel backgrounds.
One of Sisto's favorite sources is the late Ernie Bushmiller's
classic comic strip "Nancy". In Sisto's hands the frizzy-haired
heroine becomes a kind of surogate self, in essentially surrealist
narratives.
In Stinker, 1989, for example, Nancy pulls back a theatre curtain
above a pair of staring eyes that frame a penis for a nose; in
Hearth, 1989,she's carried down a ladder by a fireman. There's
a curiously distanced feeling to these images, a sense that the
events they depict are recalled like war stories. Alongside the
rescued Nancy are several drawings of ladders, as if Sisto were
trying to remember exactly which one the fireman had climbed up.
Sisto depicts these cartoon figures with a quick, almost cursory
line and bright colors--pinks, yellows,aquas--that teeter on the
edge of garishness. With their icing-thick backgrounds, these are
sensous paintings, demanding attention as objects, as narratives
and as quotations.
These compendia of popular images suggest David Salle's combines,
but they're more pointed, less about random chunks in the media
soup than about the personal resonance of archetypal stories. An
essential aspect of American Pop art was its machine-made veneer,
the slick product-like quality itshared with advertising and the
media. Sisto's voluptuous images, however, seem more closely related
to Sigmar Polke's European Pop, which combined commercial imagery
with the use of expressive line and color, holdovers from painterly
painting that on this side of the Atlantic had to be rejected as
overly dominating. Sisto's expressive use of paint allows the instant
nostalgia that characterizes Pop to come to the fore. There's a
sense of pentimenti to these image complexes that recall fragments
of Roman painting, or even closer to home, the intimate lyricism
of Joan Nelson. At the same time, Sisto's images can tilt toward
the charged anger of Surrealism. In Untitled, 1989, for example,
the gem of the show, an orange and rose backlit Nancy, eyes reduced
to tiny brackets, grins toothily; floating alongside her head is
a disembodied upside-down mouth that echoes her own. One smile
expresses chagrin, the other malicious fury. In this painting Sisto
uses the methods of painterly expression to crack the bland surface
of popularimagery, releasing the emotion it masks and parodies.
-Charles Hagen
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