The Collection includes a new piece by ELENA SISTO.
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Elena Sisto’s upcoming exhibition, “From Life”presenting paintings and works on paper. The latter grow out of a group of drawings that she began right after the World Trade Center attack. Locked out of her studio in lower Manhattan for a few months, she began working at home. The use of a mono-chromatic palette in these paintings-on-paper was intended to emphasize form but also reflect the seriousness of the time.
Ms. Sisto wanted to work from life, partly just to take stock and observe what IS. Additionally, her last show, which consisted of imaginary portraits of young girls, led her right up to the idea of observation. After years of working from imagination she was eager for new information and an expansion of sources. While cruising around her home looking for objects to paint she found her daughter’s toys—which seemed perfect in an uneasy time because toys are meant to give comfort and stimulate playfulness. They are also more designed and abstract than many other objects. The resulting paper pieces grew out of a desire to work with each object almost as a meditation and allow it to emanate it’s own character. It should be noted that the subjects aren't only or always cute; they each have an internal aspect that interests the artist in that they're ripe for her own projections.
Like the earlier portraits of adolescent girls, the toys are looking at you just as much as you're looking at them, as if the objects were alive and happened to be taking a look at our world. Gradually, relationships develop as the paintings move from single-object studies to multi-object, then from monochromatic water media on paper to multi-chromatic oil on linen. There are stories but the characters don’t act them out narratively. They’re elliptical and they keep changing. The figures are each in tension with the viewer first; secondly, with each other.
Most of the objects are figurines, not sculpture and not dolls. Something less self-conscious and functioning more as social personae, they range from wooden Hopi Katchinas to “Homies” from vending machines. The paintings are still lifes but the content is playful and very loosely autobiographical.
In her compositions Sisto creates a strong resonance between the figures and the space they reside in. As always with her work, the surface is highly charged and the rich quality of the paint contributes greatly to the expressive power of the images.
Elena's work is reviewed in the March, 2005 issue of Art in America.
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