September 12 to October 27, 2018
60 East 66th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, booksteinprojects.com

Commuting between studios in New York City and up along the Hudson, Elena Sisto has adjusted her paintings to a wider setting. Having focused previously on intimate studio scenes depicting young women painters in fragmentary close-ups, she now incorporates elements of the natural world and glimpses, as though in transit, of urban and rural landscapes. But the new works on view in As We Dream at Bookstein Projects remain firmly rooted in her personal space. Indeed, while they reflect the new ecology of her expanded studio, these unconventional self-portraits involve a heightened self-awareness, an evolving consciousness of the fragile boundaries of nature, self, and the built environment.

With no history of working from landscape, Sisto can note, as though for the first time, the intrusion of an insect, or the distraction of a flower. Virtuosic in her detailed rendering of clothing, hands and heads, she now confronts a new ecology of signs. Long devoted to cartoons and to la pittura metafisica (and an early fan of Hilma af Klint), Sisto can bring a sense of childhood wonder to the shadow of a wasp on a bare canvas. The touch of her brush takes on metaphysical implications as conventions of shading and outlining assume abstracted forms, generating symbolic images of leaves and flowers in her garden, where a pond outlined in decorative zigzags inevitably recalls the artifice of Giverny.

As if to extend this metaphysical invocation of Impressionism, Sisto’s self-portraits assume vivid new colors, as though some light attuned to emotional temperature were suddenly turned on. Impressionistic not only in their brilliance and complementary color contrasts, the heads in her portraits are calligraphic, suggestively ephemeral, like the play of emotion itself. While fugitive, their faces are placed at a greater subjective distance than the previous, more naturalistic ones. Vagabond (for Agnes Varda) (2018) alludes to the unconventional film director of Faces, Places (2017); Sisto invokes the cinematic gaze, which here is objectified in the profile views of Vagabond and Mister Moonlight (2018). Sisto’s subjects don’t meet our eyes, or do so only with the confrontational, sun-shaded ones of Orange Field (2018). The deep purple of that face, the orange of Vagabond, or the green of Spirited Away (2018), where even Nancy, a familiar cartoon surrogate from Sisto’s earliest works, returns in lime green – a vehicle for more complex, adult emotions that now include estrangement – suggest that much more is going on here than in the studio paintings. Enhanced luminosity evokes exposure and vulnerability, an uneasy undertow of ecological and sexual forces, which Sisto associates throughout with exaggerated masses of hair. Emblematic of femininity, these also recall Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of storms and floods. Sisto finds ironic humor in the way natural disasters, and the stark realities of sexual politics, compete for attention with preoccupations with fashion.

Hair overflows in Rapunella (2018), around a dark tower that invokes the genius of Philip Guston. His light bulb hangs in Rapunzel’s high window in an apparently empty studio, along with a blank canvas. Its orange glow extends into the sky outside, over churning coils of hair that press the boundaries of the frame. Alluding to the sublime, Sisto combines Guston’s cartoon-like simplification with intimations of apocalypse. The coils end with a whimsical flip, aligned with the canvas and bulb. Exiled from the sanctuary of the studio – like Guston under Nixon – Sisto upholds its formal ideals as a beacon for troubled times.

The post A New Ecology of Signs: Elena Sisto beyond the studio appeared first on artcritical.

ELENA SISTO: You’ve scaled your work up and gone quite a bit more abstract in the imagery.

KATHY BUTTERLY: My new works are larger and it feels right. It actually feels great. My work has been evolving in this direction for a while. The larger ones are allowing me to speak more formally and allowing the materials to speak in ways that I feel communicate where I am now. I’m continuing the conversation/ideas that I have been interested in for many years: color, mass of color, line, mass of line. The materials themselves take on roles in the work, becoming the protagonists or antagonists within a piece. I still enjoy working on my smaller scale forms and they are shifting too. I really like the challenges they are bringing to me; they still reference the body while also becoming more abstract.

You’ll sometimes fire a piece many times, almost to the point of exhausting the glaze. Is that because you have a succinct image in your mind of what you are after in a piece, or are you are finding it step by step? Describe your process of revision and how you change your mind about what you want.

I fire a piece from 15-30 times, a few times up to forty. I have no idea what a piece will be about or look like beforehand; I “find” the piece by working on it. With each addition of glaze or clay I need to fire the piece in order to see what I’ve done. My process and world events equally influence the direction and meaning of my work.

I start by casting a form from a plaster mold that I’ve made from a store-bought form, so a readymade, and then manipulate the clay while it is still malleable until I see/feel something in it, sort of Rorschach-like. I may add some clay forms to it then start to refine the piece. I really love this part of the process. I carve the piece, smooth it until it feels alive and becomes like a three-dimensional line drawing. Next I’ll fire the piece, put some glaze on it, then fire again, take the piece out, decide on the next color or addition and fire again.

Many mistakes are made and many times the direction I thought I was going shifts according to the results I get. I look forward to making mistakes. They’re part of the process. They push the works forward. Mistakes are great because they create mysteries/problems for me to figure out and they often take me to a deeper place where I am willing to risk losing a piece in order to make it work for me.

The amazing work of George Ohr comes up often in the context of yours. Do you look at him?

George Ohr was a genius. He was a master of his material, a master of scale. He merged figuration and abstraction and that is something I am very interested in. If you give his work time, especially the unglazed ones, you may “enter” them and understand their architecture, the mindful directionality of the work and how, ultimately, they become huge, like a Richard Serra sculpture. You just need to allow yourself to go there.

What do you look to for inspiration? Do you listen to music, NPR (like so many artists), or play TV in your studio while you’re working?

I listen to WNYC, NPR, and when I get too depressed from listening to the news I’ll listen to music. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile, Elliot Smith, Neil Young, and Ryan Adams are among my faves in the studio and I’ve also started to listen to podcasts like Sound and Vision.

Everything inspires me or at least I can say influences me, especially living in NYC and Maine. In terms of art, I’ve been looking and thinking a lot about how materials are used and how much empathy or power can be obtained from a brush stroke or a drawn line; the intentionality of a cut or a mark. Examples of this would be Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie and how much thought, weight and sense of direction went into each stroke; or Alice Neel and how much feeling she got out of one brush stroke or a drawn line; Antonella da Messina and how I feel he was sculpting his portraits with paint – just look at how he described a lip or an eye. I look at Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases and think how those probably would not have come into being had he not worked with clay beforehand and used a large fettling knife to cut through huge slabs of clay. So – how artists use their materials and get so much expression from them.

How important it is the acquisition of skill to you?

Skill is a big deal. Mastering something gives you options. It gives you freedom. When you have skill and knowledge of your materials your intuition can flow. You can take the work to where it wants to go.

Where did you study and with whom? Did being on the West Coast influence you at all?

I attended Moore College of Art in Philadelphia for undergrad and UC Davis for graduate school. At Moore I studied with Jack Thompson and Ken Vavrek where I was taught some important foundational skills for working with clay. At Davis I studied the closest with Robert Arneson. Other dynamic faculty were Wayne Thiebaud, David Hollowell, Manuel Neri, Squeak Carnwath, Mike Henderson and others. There was history at Davis and I was studying with the people who made it.

What I learned was that art was lived, it was a life style, it was your friends, it reflected the world, we all inspired each other. Of course I learned more skill, art history, etc. but it was the spirit of being an artist that probably left its mark most strongly on me.

Yes, California was influential on me and still is. I was being drawn there by the art, by the colors that were being used, how clay was being used in ways that were not traditional, not pottery – they were making art out of it. I first saw the work of Ken Price, Ron Nagle, Viola Frey, and Bob Arneson when I was at Moore College of Art. I had thought clay had no meaning- it was pottery-and they proved me wrong.

A visit by Viola Frey to Moore changed my life. At that time working with clay was not embraced by the art world the way it currently is. Viola made larger than life figurative sculptures that were equally painting and sculpture and they had meaning. I watched Viola womp down 25 lbs. of clay on the wheel and throw what was to be a large foot; this foot would be part of the base of one of her sculptures. She was a small woman who made work that was larger than life, powerful, political, and meaningful. She was a trailblazer, and she inspired me greatly.

Something that seems refreshing about working in clay is that it’s been with us for thousands of years, yet there seems to be less art theory involved than with sculpture. That may make it a more open space to work in. There’s great skill and technique involved but it’s a very empirical process. And it seems to me that you manage to elude both the more doctrinaire aspects of sculptural practice as well as the craftiness of ceramics.

Those are interesting observations. Yes. I find myself most comfortable not fittng in. This is a place for personal freedom. I don’t actively strive for this, its just who I am and the work reflects that.

When I first started out with clay I was also studying art history, painting, welding, etc. I felt a connection to clay and glaze and its potential. I also felt a strong connection to the vessel form. I learned what I needed to learn with clay and glaze to be able to make my work. I had no interest in learning how to make a pot or what temperature something was fired to. I just wanted the work to get fired to a state to where I could see the colors and the clay was hard. I’m interested in what my materials can do and how I can get to speak through them.

Many of your pieces stretch to reference an external system, object, order or artwork and then metamorphose or crumple into an intimate huddle–a pile up of attributes. (I can almost hear a whole range of sounds when looking at your work, like harrumphing, lip-smacking, quiet snorting, yawning, and dripping.) The pieces evidence psychic statthe collapse of an effort–or even a pretense–into a self-knowing and self-accepting humor and wellbeing. That brings to mind the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who had a concept he called “going on being.” He believed that in a healthy parent-child relationship, the child is allowed to develop within the benign attention of the parents and feels supported and safe in her investigations and challenges. This allows her to forge a sense of self-continuity, self-acceptance and awareness of her ability to accomplish things on her own. If the parent intrudes upon or curtails the child’s process it stops the child from “going on being” and forces them to react to the parent instead. Does that concept relate to what you feel you’re doing?

You nailed it! Yes, that’s a great way to explain how I work. I feel that while I am working on a piece, I am its enabler, I take it to where it needs to go, the psychic state which is a reflection of what I am feeling at the time.

There are also formal considerations that go into the works that help to reinforce the piece’s emotive qualities by either adding psychological strength or adding psychological disorder. An example of this is the quality of a line. A line can be confident by being bold, perfect, a solid color, or can be nervous or shy by being thin, wispy, jagged. So line is both a formal and an emotional aspect of the work. As one who works three dimensionally, I also consider line to be the outline of the form itself.

So when I look at one of my forms the first thing I see when I start is a three-dimensional line drawing. I consider it a perfect line. In my work I currently feel this need to have something absolutely beautiful and perfect in it so that I can allow myself to have chaos in it. I need a balance of grace and chaos in my work. Line allows this.

How important is color?

Color is very important to me. Like line, color can have personality and also works formally. I use color in many different ways. Over the years I’ve built up a strong relationship to color and how it can create meaning. Sometimes glaze is built up so thick on a piece that the color itself becomes a form, and many times a sort of protagonist or antagonist in a piece. I have built up an understanding of the qualities of color; it can be translucent, solid, dry, cracked, glossy, etc. This all adds to the dialogue and meaning. Colors also represent meaning in terms of association to things in the real world. I feel that I have relationships with colors as I am working on a piece. Just like I feel I need to enable a piece to develop, I need to enable a color to speak, have meaning, have form.

I think you have achieved a mastery of your medium. There’s a fairly sizeable cohort of women artists for the first time in history coming to the fore that have really achieved mastery. It’s an exciting phenomenon to witness, enjoy and benefit from. Do you feel this also?

Absolutely, and thank you. I love what I do. I love learning about my materials and this learning is not done by reading or watching what others do but by doing, by making, by making mistakes that then turn into knowledge and possibly add value to the conversation and become a tool. I’m a big fan of Sheila Hicks, Rachel Harrison, Charlene Von Heyl, Amy Sillman, Phyllida Barlow and so many others. And though Alice Neel and Joan Mitchell have been embraced by the art world for quite a while I feel there has been renewed interest and re-evaluation of the importance of their work. Alina Szapocznikow also comes to mind.

I agree about these artists, but for the sake of argument I would call Alice Neel and Joan Mitchell pioneers. I’m thinking of the cohort coming after them. There’s a real swelling of the ranks starting with women now in their late 60’s or their 70’s, like Katherine Bradford, Louise Fishman, Mary Heilmann, Judy Linhares, Melissa Meyer, Catherine Murphy, Dona Nelson, Joyce Pensato, Joan Snyder, Barbara Takenaga, and many more. Many of these women are associated in some way with feminism or at least are benefitting from the gains of feminism. Then the next wave of women gets even larger. Maybe because of the effects of feminism women are finding a real place to stand in the culture and have a lot to say – and new ways of saying it. It’s invigorating for everyone.

Yes, I and I would include you too. What all these women have in common is a command of material and a strong sense of self. I’m friends with many of these artists and can say that all have dedicated their lives to their work.

Thank you.

Speaking of Joyce Pensato, she has Giacometti in her DNA and he was the king of repetition within very narrow parameters. What is the importance of repetition to you?

I feel a connection to Joyce, taking the same form, Mickey, and using it over and over again as her “vessel”…..yes, I do feel a connection and an understanding of why she does it.

Is repetition a way of making a place and an identity for yourself? Could you say that if one didn’t repeat oneself their work would lack meaning, it’d just be permutation?

KB:I like the idea of place. Yes, it is a place- a personal space in my mind for thought. I think the word identity feels too self conscious for me, I guess identity comes out of it but its not the starting point. Artists who immediately come to mind, whose work is repetitious and whose work I admire, are Stanley Whitney and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Repetition of an idea is, in a way, the same as mastering your materials- you are ‘mastering’ a concept or trying to fully understand an idea or a feeling- you are searching. The more one works at it, understands it, gets lost in it, fails it, triumphs, and walks into the unknown the more one masters it and then ‘owns’ it.

The other thing I can say about repetition or limiting oneself to an idea is that it is actually not limiting! Same thing for materials. You keep pushing the boundaries and you go to deeper places. I guess one could think that by ‘limiting’ myself to only ceramic materials and to a vessel oriented form that I would be bored or repeat myself, but I actually find the opposite to be true. There are times in the studio when something feels too familiar so I sabotage it and then deal with it—sometimes coming out with a new color, texture, idea. I know that for me the artists whom I feel the deepest connection to are artists who are obsessed with an idea, are forever on the ‘search’ and have a deep connection to their materials.

To address the second question- I can’t say that lack of repetition equals lack of meaning. I think there are plenty of good artists who have the ability to work with varied materials, varied styles, and varied ideas and find meaning in their work. I think they have an idea and need to see it out in different ways; Fischli & Weiss and Picabia come to mind.

What about Alina Szapocznikow?

Her stuff is creepy and beautiful and amazing. I saw her show at MoMA a few years back. There was a lot of work and I wasn’t sure how much I liked it but it stuck with me and now I really like it, but probably in small doses.

There’s often a smile in your work. Literally an upwards-turning curve that creates an emotional lift.

Yes, lately that has been my “in” to the piece. Don’t know why, just going with it.

Sometimes the grin is hopeful and happy. Sometimes it’s sarcastic and sinister. Sometimes it’s an ambivalent and worried smile. I work with or against the smile. It’s always there whether I cover it up or keep it.

The post “Going on Being”: Kathy Butterly in conversation with Elena Sisto appeared first on artcritical.

Leslie Wayne is known for the vivid density and colorful materiality of her work, most recently a collection of what she called “paint rags” which hang from the wall, and are actually made of many layers of paint. Her latest work, on show at Jack Shainman Gallery through October 21, has undergone a marked change: there’s larger scale of image and an intensified playfulness with modes of representation and with process.

ELENA SISTO: I love the way humor is fore-fronted in this new work. You’ve scaled up your subject, slowed it down and gone directly for the comedic instead of sleight-of-hand.

LESLIE WAYNE: I’m told that I was the family clown as a child. I do love making people laugh and I am mad for puns. Having said that, I can’t claim that I decided in advance to make funny paintings. Perception has been at the crux of my thinking about this work, trying to dislodge the viewer from their expectations. Humor is just one tool among many, but it’s a seductive one and I love using it.

I enjoy playing with the relationship between language and the conceptual core of the painting. For example, in (W)resting Robert I’ve painted an image of a metal chair in my studio which takes up the entire space of the panel, making the panel in effect the chair itself. Then, draped over the back of the panel/chair are various sheets of paint that resemble fabric, the most prominent being a copy of an early Robert Ryman painting. I’ve wrested his painting from my pantheon of idols and laid it to rest on the back of my studio chair. I’ve moved on!

I like words that function as both adjective and verb. For instance, the word free in Free Experience functions that way. Or I’ll play with a word as it relates to an idea in a painting. It might sound like it could be the subject of the painting if you hadn’t read it. Would for example begs the question–would water really come out of a fence like that? But it also sounds like the word “wood.” That’s funny to me.

Is the humor a purely personal development? Or are you responding to politics? You have one painting of a window through which I see what looks like a melting atmosphere. Does it relate to climate change?

You’re talking about Snowmageddon. That painting started out as an homage to the Ukiyo-e prints of Hokusai. I happened to finish it right after the last major snowstorm of the winter, hence the title. I am keenly aware of our environmental crisis, but that is as political as my work gets. At one time I worked with an ocean conservation group and my paintings during that period dealt with issues of sustainability and climate change. It’s never far from my mind, however it’s not really the focus of this body of work. But who could possibly ignore the politics of this moment in time?! It’s insane!

What are some of the other tools you might use to dislodge the expectations of the viewer? And why is that important to you?

Using trompe l’œil and abstraction alongside dimensional verisimilitude is pretty interesting – mixing it all up, like in the piece entitled Wood. I wondered how many different ways I could describe a subject in one painting. I wanted to surprise myself as well as the viewer. That was important to me – to free up the experience for both of us.

It’s important to be surprised and delighted by something visual in the real world, as opposed to the virtual or the digital world. Painting has the power to do that – to make you see something you think you know in a completely new way.

You’ve been working and showing for quite a few years. Have you been involved with any long-term underlying themes?

The two consistent driving forces in my work have been nature and perception. The subject of nature has to do with my having grown up in California-its particular sense of color and light, and a specific relationship to the landscape and geology: earthquakes, giant Sequoias, the desert and the Pacific. There’s also a kinship with craft and materiality that is uniquely West Coast. Even the most conceptually driven work of many West Coast artists has been grounded in phenomenological experience rather than theory. Robert Irwin is a great example. Maybe that’s where part of my interest in perception comes from. One of my favorite books of all time is Lawrence Weschler’s “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.” I want my paintings to make you forget language, even while I’m punning!

Do I see intimations of Léger, Guston, Oldenburg? Are the paintings more Pop?

Guston, yes, but Pop is not a reference, unless you’re talking about Duchamp as the forefather of Pop. He was a driving force in my last body of work. Guston gives everyone permission to move from abstraction to figuration. I studied painting and drawing in a traditional manner. I’ve been trying to bring that deeply satisfying activity of observational image making back into my work, in a way that makes sense given my very peculiar process.

Your process is unique. The only person I can think of who has used paint similarly to you is Scott Richter, in his older work. How do you make a piece?

Richter was involved with a kind of spectacular accumulation of massive amounts of paint on a surface. Those tables were pretty dazzling. I use what some consider a massive amount of paint, but I’m not interested in the accumulation of it per se. It’s the ways in which the paint can be manipulated to resemble forms in nature that interests me–using paint to create dimension disarms and surprises the viewer, because of the way it mimics the object it represents in the real world. I’ve manhandled paint in many different ways over the years, mostly by building up thin layers of color and then doing things like scoring, peeling, scraping, folding, draping and collaging it. But I’m not interested in describing my process. It’s not that it’s a secret. It just detracts from what I think should be the driving experience of looking at art–being transported.

You mention a West Coast-type phenomenological approach. Could you explain why it’s important? 

Southern California was a magical place to grow up. Blue skies every day, temperature a steady 73°F year round, beach to the West, desert and mountains to the East. Even my most vivid memory of an earthquake is dreamy, as I recall the street I was standing on and the whole neighborhood becoming like the deck of a ship, gently rocking back and forth for several long minutes. My sensibilities were honed on my physical experience of the world, not on ideas. I’m not particularly intellectual, and that plays out in my approach to making art. Having said that, my work is decidedly not about process, it’s more about a desire to make the material connect with the subject in a visceral way.

Who are some of the artists you admire? I see references to different textile traditions–African for one.

I do love textiles and textile designs from around the world. They inform the more decorative aspects of my work. The term decoration has suffered from quite a lot of cultural bias. I don’t see myself as belonging to the Pattern and Decoration school, but I do find that pattern is a universal vehicle that everyone can take deep pleasure in.

Forms in nature have long been a source, but I’m moving away from that now. I’m drawn to a wide gamut of artists who are peculiar and unique in different ways. Right now an image of a beautiful Mamma Andersson painting is informing a new work; also a photograph of Rodney Graham in a tux sitting at a set of drums with a plate of steak and peas, which is hilarious. I often revisit Elizabeth Murray or Martin Puryear for inspiration or look through books of Matisse, Stuart Davis or Charles Burchfield, just to snatch up bits of imagery. There’s no denying a relationship between my work and that of my husband, Don Porcaro. We are in each other’s studios all the time. Mostly I like to see what my colleagues are doing, and what the next generation of artists are making and how they are thinking. On the one hand it’s an embarrassment of riches to have so much to look at. On the other it’s overwhelming to the point of distraction. Then I re-focus in the studio and remember what it is I do best. And that’s all one can do, right?

Do you have any rules for yourself in the studio?

Yes I do actually. Accomplish at least one thing.

The post The Family Clown: A Studio Visit with Leslie Wayne appeared first on artcritical.

LESLIE WAYNE: Your new paintings are terribly funny! How refreshing to bring humor into a canon so historically laden with gravitas. Particularly since the underlying themes of your work have always been deeply psychological (not that the human mind isn’t fodder for constant hilarity).

As I understand it, there are many members of your extended family who were in the mind trade. When I look at your work of the last 15 years, I can’t help but think about the impact of that personal history, subliminal or not, on the ideas that have consistently engaged you over time, the female personae, personhood, and identity as an individual artist within the wider membership of a tribe of artists and the art world. 

You’ve said that you love Freud. But the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious immediately comes to mind when I think about how your paintings, from the three-quarter female figures of 2005 to the young women artists in their studios, which you made between 2010 and 2012, have represented the idea of a collective identity within this tribe. In your current show, you have shifted from the female personae/artist as an archetype, to the self-portrait. You, the individual, an individuated artist, in her own studio. What prompted you to make that shift?

ELENA SISTO: My father is an aeronautical engineer, which has influenced me very much. My mother is a social worker and I had an aunt and uncle who were therapists and a cousin who is a psychiatrist. The conversation in my family was oddly “psychoanalytical” — not sure how accurate that term actually is for what went on – and intellectualized. Freudian concepts were thrown around rather recklessly, I’d say, in retrospect. Consequently I had to look up Uncle (because his name was invoked so often) Sigmund for myself in order to get an idea of what he was really about.

That family experience sent me and my work on a path progressing very purposefully away from the psychoanalytic towards emotionality and the pleasure of paint, a shift from above the neck to below the neck, so to speak. I really liked Freud’s writings, especially what he wrote about humor, loss and the uncanny. He was a warm human being, I think. I was interested in Jung’s ideas as well, especially the collective unconscious, but I he wasn’t so nice.

In the long-term view, the “Girl” or “Daughter” paintings and my last show of young women artists were the anomaly. I have mostly always painted autobiographically. Those two shows were about my daughter, Clara, and the insight that observing the process of her life gave me on my own experience of adolescence and young adulthood. I wanted to go back over that period and set some things straight for myself. I was comparing her experience to mine. But I also knew that the issues were ones many young women are involved with, balancing between the public and the private, self-consciousness and the need to be seen. The bottom line is that I always seem to work from what’s right under my nose.

Humor is a way of disrupting the current order of things, touching the emotional depths and coming back up to new possibilities. My father, the engineer, has a great, dry, sense of humor. It takes a minute to realize he’s made a joke and then you can’t believe how silly it is. He was able to slip in and break up the tyranny of the psychological, thankfully.

I’m glad you found them funny, by the way.

Yes, and they’re actually funny to me in the way that you describe your father being funny. They’re kind of sly. They sneak up on you and then they continue to tickle. The extreme close-ups feel like you’re saying, “Can you believe how great that is?” But I wonder also about your father’s being an engineer and how that’s influenced the way you think about your pictures as constructions. 

I’m glad you asked that.

There are three ways. First of all, an engineer is a designer. I can remember seeing my father sit in his chair at his desk thinking for hours and hours. Just thinking. And then swiftly writing down pages of numbers and formulas on a yellow pad, a completely foreign language, with sketches. The solitariness of the pursuit. The drawing. And the experimental approach to structures.

Second, his field was flutter, of airfoils and jet engines mostly, anticipating and dealing with turbulent airflow. To me the ideas of fluid mechanics have always seemed analogous to the movement of form and paint in the space of a picture: the effects of compression, expansion and temperature on flow, what happens when a passage of paint is squeezed by the forms on either side of it, or when those forms let up and allow expansion, rhythm, speed and momentum. Those things all relate to ideas of plasticity in painting and drawing. He doesn’t necessarily agree by the way.  But that’s ok.

Finally, the far out weirdness of some of his inventions, the willingness to really go out on a limb is like an artist.

Hmm. Cubism would be the most obvious analogy to an experimental approach to structures, and your work certainly takes many cues from that period of Modernism. Whereas your interest in the fluid mechanics of material feels completely Post-modern – a passion for the inherent thingness of paint and how it behaves as separate from the image. Using oil and water based paint together seems like a way for you to achieve a sensuality that is both mechanically challenging and delicious to behold, but never at the expense of the picture. In other words, your technique does not hold the image hostage to its materiality, which is hard to do. 

But let’s get back to the space in your paintings. Unlike standard Cubism, or say, reverse perspective in the works of Mernet Larsen and Scott Grodesky (both recently the subject of discussion over Facebook by two spaceshifters in their own work, David Brody and Alexi Worth) your space seems to come out of the flat world of cartoons. Your space is very shallow and in some cases feels like it’s pressed right up against the surface. In “Couch” it’s almost as if the space in the painting and all the objects in it, were painted originally in the round – literally bent around a tube – and then splayed out flat on a table. SPLAT! In “Splurt” the hand holding the paint tube (which itself has a picture of a hand holding a paint tube or some sort of jar on the front) and the paint that’s being squeezed out of it, have nowhere to go but right up against the camera lens. IN YOUR FACE! But in spite of the lack of room to move, your pictures feel neither aggressive nor claustrophobic. On the contrary, they are filled with light and air and joy, which I believe has a lot to do with your palette. Can you talk about that? 

Cubism has been quite important to me. I see it as the last great innovation in pictorial structure. The concepts of Cubism are extremely provocative. They open up a huge amount of freedom to paint what, where, how and when you want, not to mention painting what is otherwise unseen. I don’t think we’ve played this out yet by any means. Alexi is a great example of someone taking advantage of those freedoms, as are Carroll Dunham, Judith Linhares, Katherine Bradford, Tom Burckhardt, Elliot Green. Dana Schutz’s work has become very Cubist recently. I would say all these people are working in a classical Cubist painting space. It’s the imagery, the content and the authors that are different. They may disagree.

I don’t exactly think of my work as coming out of cartoon space or as flat, unless you are calling “compressed” “flat”. Because there’s flat “flat” too. I think of the space as compressed and the imagery influenced by cartoons. The Post Modern element is in the imagery.

And I think one of the best examples of the compression and expansion I was referring to would be Morandi. The rest you describe better than I probably could. But if you think of Morandi, Matisse, Picabia, Picasso, Guston, they all were involved with these issues.

I do want my painting to move forward from the canvas and I feel like I am only beginning to understand color. It’s so powerful all on it’s own and there’s a great deal of emotion in it.

Getting away from the city makes all the difference. Where the air is cleaner, color is pure energy. In the city it seems to be more of an attribute of something else.

Everyone’s sense of color is so intuitive, even if they’ve studied color theory. I have a friend who has the weirdest palette and I finally asked him one day what he based his color choices on, and he told me that he was color blind to red. He saw all reds as grays. That’s an extreme case. But beyond the technical optics of color and light, there’s no denying the intense emotional power of color. I think color can function as a reflection of one’s internal make up and history as well. What’s bred in the bone. I never studied color, and so my color sensibility is completely informed by having grown up on the West Coast. The Pacific Ocean to me just seems to fill the sky with more lumens! So I understand how environment can deeply affect your work. So do you generally prefer to work upstate, or is this something specific to these new paintings? How does being in the country influence your process?

I love being upstate because I can forget about everything and just work. I feel like I am in love with where I am and I am working all the time up there even when I am not painting. People are more casual. There’s more elbowroom. I have great neighbors. Everything is good to look at. We’re surrounded by animals. The animals are intense! I can see things more clearly. I do need to bring the paintings down here for a little reality check. I can begin to believe they will make themselves up there or that everything is good. But most of the paintings in the show were painted up there at least in part.

Surprisingly, my dog and studio mate, Busby, prefers the NYC studio. Mostly because he has the perfect place to bask in the sun here and get rainbows scattered all over him, my little sybarite. I keep prisms in the windows everywhere.

Prominent in this group of new paintings are your hands — swatting flies, cradling Busby, clutching a bowl of salad while painting, squeezing out a tube of color, and of course, forever holding your brushes. Was that an intentional theme or did you just find yourself subliminally coming back to the one tool that forever connects your heart and mind to the muscle memory of making pictures?

I decided to crop in on the figure and lose the head for a while because the head implies consciousness and then suddenly the viewer is thinking about what the painting is thinking. The face can suck up all the meaning out of the rest of the picture and make it too specific. I want the painting to be about what I feel so I concentrate on other parts of the (my) body that are more available for identification. In fact, the plane is often completely identified with my body.

The hands function very much like the head without that extra degree of specificity, which can send the entire picture off in a narrative direction or turn the figure into an object. I don’t paint narrative. I’m much more interested in the emotionality, the abstract level of the work, the paint and light. That said, I am always trying to bring the head back in but in a more dynamic way. Or maybe I should say less dynamic.

They are amazingly successful at attaining a perfect tension between emotionality, conceptual rigor and technical light-footedness. Then there is the subject of the artist in her studio, which has been a subject of fascination for generations. How do you see your work in the context of that history? Or does it even matter to you?

Thank you! I totally see my work in that context and I keep it around me in the form of reproductions. I’ve thought long and hard about what I want to put into other people’s lives and what I have to offer. Since the studio is what I know best at this point, that is what I am painting. I think people are very interested in artists and artists are interested in each other. The different states of being in the studio, the sense of suspension and potential, making your own rules, the cooperation between forms, the ability to be your own best judge, the sensuality of it — how can you go wrong?

The post “The Solitariness of the Pursuit”: A Studio Visit with Elena Sisto appeared first on artcritical.

One of the many artists and writers mentored by Bob was Stephen Westfall who generously helped edit this piece from a much longer transcript. artcritical joins me in thanking Stephen for his efforts in this endeavor. ES

ROBERT BERLIND: NSCAD [Nova Scotia College of Art and Design] [Berlind’s first teaching gig after graduating Yale] was a stronghold of conceptual art. And that was my first direct exposure to a lot of people who were involved with it and I found it very interesting. I was painting portraits at the time and I don’t think they knew what to make of it, except I think they thought it was conceptual. [laughter] And I painted everybody. Turned out that probably the most interesting people around were, you know, friends, students and faculty. And after two years I decided it was time to leave and I came to New York and I found this place for $250 dollars a month.

ELENA SISTO: No kidding? Oh my God.

[laughs] It was raw, this place.

When was this?

In 1976. And I got back all of my taxes that I had paid to the Canadian government because it was not more than two years.   The exchange rate was good at that time, so I came with about $11-12,000 dollars and was able to get started. And then I did gigs. I went out to the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and did a month. And a year later, NSCAD asked me if I’d come back to teach a foundation course because somebody was leaving. I said okay, and eventually started showing. A friend said, “You should be having a place to show your work and a place to publish your writing and a place to teach. ” And I got them all within a fairly short time.

Amazing

I was amazed.

So who were you showing with?

I first started with Alexander Milliken on Prince Street. I had a few shows there. Then I went to Jeanne Siegel on 57th and then I went to Tibor de Nagy and then I went to Findlay Fine Art.   I’ve left that and so now I don’t have representation. But I had a lot of shows in New York during the course of that time, and outside of New York. And I had—what was I painting? From the portraits, I got into painting spaces in rooms, windows and reflections in windows at night and so on. And those were the first paintings I did in my studio, which then had the old windows so it was kind of an interesting reflections, and looking through and painting the reflection at the same time. And it was clear by this time that my interest was really in probing perception itself and those situations where you see more than one thing at a time, like seeing through a window and seeing a reflection and seeing the window itself, you know? I thought how do you do that?

So you’re seeing three things—

Plus whatever—

Plus then you intermix them in ways that—

You find ways of trying to make that distinct. And sometimes with a portrait involved. In fact, I discovered how to deal with the glass by doing a portrait, and it was my peripheral vision that kicked in.

Oh yes, I see what you’re saying.

So I did a whole series of night paintings of windows, and then moved through the windows and made night paintings in the country and in the city outside.

What year are we at now?

1980, 1981. And I did a large series of night paintings, some of them very large, one up to fourteen feet. And—where did that go? Then I started doing them in the daytime. I mean it just opened up, you know? So I was painting mostly outside by that time and we had a place upstate.

 And you always paint from perception?

I always had, yeah. And I would go out and do a small—if it was very dark, dark, dark, I’d make a, just a rough charcoal drawing and come inside and make a little oil study, and if I had something, it would become a larger painting. And I stayed with that basically or I’d do a little painting outside. And I sort of fell in love with painting in a new way because every move you make counts for so much.

And I realized that’s what I was doing in the portraits, actually too. Because I had been doing pencil portraits for a while and rather stylized, and at one point I was working on somebody, earlier when I lived in New York, and I had a young woman, a Haitian woman who would sit for me sometimes. And one day she had her hair in curlers, these big curlers. And she was very pretty and I thought she looked like a princess, and I asked if I could paint her and she had to check with her family because this was not considered right. And I started a big painting of her. And I was having trouble with the drawing, getting it right, and then I started working directly with the painting. And I thought, this is amazing, it’s so much faster than drawing and says so much more, and everything you do counts in such a deliberate way. And I loved that. And that was really counter to my earlier idea about painting, which is about an abstract configuration that may or may not have a subject. So I loved that that my perception was leading my marks. And I was in love with that idea that it’s happening right now.

That ultimately—and I think going to Japan was part of this, many years later, in 2011. I got interested in the more synthetic aspect of Japanese culture. Which is to say, you’re doing a lot of different things and putting them together in a quite deliberate fashion. And I thought, well, that’s more conceptually controlled.

You mean “synthetic” in the sense of somewhat—

Synthesis of different things.

In the sense of synthetic cubism ?

Yes, it’s a synthesis of different perceptions, and perhaps even materials. And really, Japanese culture seems to me like that. The language is like that and the food is like that and one thing modifies another in interesting ways. And it wasn’t so much any painting that I saw. I always loved the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and I studied that and made some while I was there. I’d go out and draw every day. I couldn’t set up and paint in the temple complexes, but I would draw the gardens and parts of buildings or whatever struck me. Toward the end of my time there, the rice paddies started coming up. I’d seen them being planted. I came back with some studies and drawings and photos and did mostly that for a couple of years once I got back.

Now, we’re coming close to the present, right?

Yeah. This was 2012, 2013. The paintings that you saw in the American Academy and that you’d seen here were all done here. A few of the first ones were done there. It hooked me. It related to things I had done before and I kept thinking, well, okay, that’s probably enough of this, and then I’d have an idea for another one and have to proceed. They’re part invention, part synthesizing different drawings or studies I had made and part inventing as I went along. I used to think if I really knew how to do something, it couldn’t be authentic. It was just repeating Abstract Expressionism. Not that those guys didn’t do exactly that but—You can spot any Ab-Ex painter from a block away because they have a signature for that and a way of handling paint and so forth.

Okay. Yeah. Which was against their ethos in a way.

But the idea was—Irving Sandler tells this story about being at the club one time and somebody standing up and saying, “When I approach that blank canvas, I have no idea what I’m going to do. It’s all, you know, just leaping into the void. I have no idea what’s going to happen. ” And someone said, something like “After twenty years? ” [laughs]

Oh, that’s great, yeah.

So that’s the end of Abstract Expressionism. [laughs]

When I was at the Studio School, I have this very great, very vivid memory of Rosemarie Beck sitting on the stairs going down into the drawing room, going like this, “Oh, it’s not possible! It’s not possible!” Meaning, you know, it’s not possible to make a painting.

Right. Right.

[laughs] I didn’t have the nerve, but I wanted to say, “Why are you teaching then,” you know? But that brings up a good subject, which—

It was a real shift in attitude.

It’s a real shift in attitude and, actually, when I was there, we were considered—if we thought about the market at all, we were considered dirty. But within a few years, all of those teachers were sneaking back up to us and saying, “Well, how did you actually get a gallery? ” you know? But there was a time period in the 1940s and 1950s where—the idea was not really about making money from your work. And then people started making money from their work. But along with the extreme of something like the Studio School or the Abstract Expressionist ethos came a certain attitude towards process, right?

And still very essential to my practice really. I think process is crucial.

So you’ve got that throwing yourself to the universe and finding your way back sort of?

No.

Well, I mean the ethos of the Abstract Expressionist, you know, in psychoanalytical terms would be to get yourself down into your unconscious, get lost and find your way out again.

Right.

And in that process, you’re making a painting. And then on the other end of the scale you’ve got people who are, you know, painting for the market. They already know what they’re painting. They have signature paintings. Someone can order a painting before it’s even painted—the waiting list. So bringing those two together without losing—it’s a very difficult balance to bring the integrity, even if it’s a little bit corny and a little bit false, maybe a little bit exaggerated, of the Abstract Expressionist ethos and then the practical considerations of needing to sell your painting in order to make painting.

Sure.

I mean the 1950 and the 1940s were the only time in the history of painting when people thought it shouldn’t be sold.  

That’s right, sure.

So for you, how have you resolved that conflict over time?

Well, I taught for years. I didn’t depend on sales. If I had something sold it was great, but it was gravy. I wasn’t ambitious. I wasn’t in New York until 1976 in a kind of really constant way. So I was very unprofessional in that way. I mean it wasn’t virtuous. Finally, it was not paying attention to something. But what continues to be true is that you have parameters within which you can work naturally, in some way that really connects to your proclivities, your abilities, your talents, your interests, so that whatever you’re doing, you probably find, well, you work certain sizes of painting. And if you get out of that suddenly you can’t make the moves that you’re used to making. If I am working on a painting and it’s the wrong size, I can’t get it.

Yeah. So in other words, you get lost but you’re lost within the parameters. So there’s a safety in knowing your parameters.

And if you lose that then you don’t know what you’re doing. And a lot of artists don’t know where they connect to what they’re doing, however good it might look.

Yeah.

Your work is very specific in size.

Mine?

Yeah. Very specific, and it wants to be that size and it doesn’t want to be—I mean if it got three times as large. But it wouldn’t be the same painting at all. So you’re working at a scale where you can feel it through and stay in touch with the entire image in every respect. And if one doesn’t find that it’s not going to feel right, either to the painter or I think ultimately to the viewer.

Well that brings me to the next question, I believe, because your parameters are obviously not only size. How would you describe what the parameters are that you work within, in every sense? Like the way you set up your studio, the way that you listen to music, how much stimulation you need from the outside . . .

I find I work best now in some seclusion. It’s great to be Upstate and in my studio and nobody sees the work until there’s a bunch of work. And somebody said, “Well, what is your inspiration? Where do you get your inspiration from?” And I think you get it from working. That’s where I really get the, you know, the forward drive, doing something and questions start to arise and possibilities and your appetite increases.

At the Studio School, painting was treated almost as if it was a calling rather than a profession. We spent eight hours every day and every night and on the weekend in the studio. And then when we weren’t in the studio, we were in the museum, and when we weren’t in the museum, we were in the library.   When I go into my studio, my ideal is to just sort of putter around, clean up, do things and not even notice that I’ve started painting. And then, you know, when you finish what you have to finish, you stop. And that takes many hours at least five every day, and many more than that. Do you feel similarly to that?

I do when I’m on. And when I’m off—like this winter, I didn’t do much work because my health was so bad. And then barriers start to get put in place somehow. I become more critical of what I’ve done, of what I’m thinking about doing, because all I have is my mind to think about it at that point, Then it’s very good to see some work that I love, you know, somebody else’s work—

To get your juices flowing—

Or just find a way in. And usually when I start, it’s right there, it’s just waiting for me. But I feel the obstacles and so I’ll be in a place where, oh, you know, maybe I’ll just take a nap or I’ll read or I’ll do yard work or I’ll do something else, where I find myself resisting, to a certain point, getting in to it. Because I know once I’m in it, it’s like, it’s consuming, you know?

I read a great Matisse quote, which I’m paraphrasing it, but he said, “You have to work every day all day long in order to be irresponsible enough to do what you need to do. ”  

Isn’t that great?

Because you don’t even know that you’re taking a risk at that point, that you might lose something if you pursue something.

That’s quite true. Because when you’re aware of taking a risk, it’s in relation to who you think you are.

That’s a good point.

You know, and who you think you are, that’s always beside the point in a way, isn’t it, for real work?

It’s totally beside the point.

Guston made this famous remark that when he goes in the studio, art history is there, his teachers are there, his critics, everybody, and then one by one they leave the studio. And then he said, “And finally I leave too. ” And then it’s clear time—then you’re in the zone to really work.

Yeah.

There’s a point where I don’t even know I’m painting. You just work, you’re just doing—you look and you know what to do next and you just keep doing what you need to do. And then you back off and you think about it, or somebody comes in the studio and you talk about what you do and you conceptualize things that didn’t necessarily come out of any clear plan.

So what else do you have to have in order in your life and in your studio in order to be creative?

Well, it helps once I’m on a trajectory, once I’m plugged into something, I would just go outside, look around and see something interesting and paint that. And I would discover what was interesting about it. It wasn’t just that it was pretty. It was that some issue emerged in the course of it. But it wasn’t with a lot of planning. I might have a notion I want a deep space or I want a certain kind of structure, but it wouldn’t necessarily be what I’d find. So I just followed my instincts and my pleasure in painting, or attraction to a difficulty, whatever that might be. For a long while I did images of water without ever thinking about water as my subject. I just like this play of reflection.

The rice paddy paintings?

The rice paddies as well. You can see the bottom, you can see a reflection, you can see a ripple, you can see something floating on it. And I did a lot of paintings of just that kind of a situation: streams or ponds or whatever in the country. That was already about more than one thing going on at once. And back to those windows, the things that keep attracting me were things that escape complete mental control in a way. There’s something going on that puts it in the now.

Something ambiguous, yeah.

And that itself had been a shift from an idea that, you know, the Impressionist idea that you’re just painting a field of vision. I thought Porter in a way extended that, though he was doing other things as well. And I thought, no, because a field of vision depends on what’s in your mind.

Yes, of course.

I mean that was Cézanne’s break, after all, from Impressionism, that it depends what you’re looking for or how you’re looking. So what you really see is not just how you’re painting or what it looks like. It’s how you are looking. So that ultimately that becomes a subject—not too self-conscious, hopefully, but that becomes a subject. And so you’re painting. I guess we’re all working on what it’s like to be alive in this world today, how we experience that in the most vital way that gets us actually doing something and tangling with it and wrestling with it and whatever else we do with it. And so painting requires a heightened desire to be painting.

As far as talent goes— I’ve always been very diffident about my own skills. I started a little bit later in school, you know, and I always thought, well, there are people who are so fluent — John Singer Sargent, to take an extreme case. And not that I want to make Sargents, but there are people who can just—a Rembrandt—have a thought and do a little squiggle and it’s all there. And I thought, God, I’m a long way from that. And then I realized, now, wait a minute, anything you really want to do, you can figure out how to do it. You know, I used to worry about, oh God, how can I mix those colors, I never kept track. It takes two minutes, I can mix anything—you know, thinking I won’t know how to, but it happens. So the difficulty of something is not an issue for me.

Do you premix your colors before you paint?

Sometimes I do. I intend to do it more for large paintings.

You intend to do it in the future or you always intend to and it doesn’t work out?

Well, I have intended to also but sometimes I can’t wait. [laughs]

Robert Berlind: Kyoto/Cochecton at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. January 9 to February 13, 2016
Elena Sisto: Afternoons at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, March 17 to April 23, 2016

The post “What You Really See Is How You Are Looking”: Robert Berlind Interviewed appeared first on artcritical.

Photographs by Robin Siegel, Installation shots by Allyson Shea, Report by David Cohen
click any image to activate slideshow

A Mark Greenwold show is hardly less rare than a new painting from this OCD master of minutiae:  to give the fellow a normal-sized show you pretty much need to stage a mini-survey.  That’s what his new dealers,  Sperone Westwater, have done for the veteran fantasy realist on the third floor of their Norman Foster-designed railroad gallery on the Bowery, in a show that takes its title from a line of Stanley Cavell’s hand-inscribed at its entrance: “The cause of tragedy is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change.”

His admirers were out in force the Friday night of Frieze weekend, including a number of sitters in his bizarre psycho-dramas.  Amongst the latter category were Chuck Close and James Siena who besides their visages and birthday suits also contribute to Greenwold’s visual vocabulary in the form of their trademark pictorial marks – Close’s lozenges, Siena’s algorithmic zags – that the artist uses as kind of thought bubbles hovering over his dramatis personae’s heads.

In his New York Sun review of Greenwold’s last survey, at DC Moore Gallery in the Fall of 2007, artcritical editor David Cohen wrote in terms that still apply that “Mr. Greenwold revels in capturing each hair on a dog, or each thread in a carpet, with a nutty regard for exactitude

Like psychoanalysis, around which these strange dramas revolve, Mr. Greenwold’s painting mode supposes that no detail is to be ignored and that time is no object. Psychoanalysis is the key — if not to decoding these bizarre, narcissistic soul dramas, then at least to understanding the strange genre in which they occur. For Mr. Greenwold’s pictures occupy an ambiguous space nestled between allegory and narrative. Each of the figures feels highly isolated, and yet each one plays a function in relation to the action unfolding around them all.

On view at 257 Bowery between Houston and Stanton streets, New York City, 212.999.7337 through June 28, 2013

The post Killer Opening For “Murdering The World,” Mark Greenwold’s Long-Awaited Debut at Sperone Westwater appeared first on artcritical.

April 25, to May 25, 2013
138 Tenth Avenue at 19th Street
New York City, 212 7500949

Sentimentality, nostalgia, and illustration are the common pitfalls for a figurative painter undertaking to represent feeling and emotion — particularly when the imagery is invented and not photo derived. There is a huge payoff, however, for facing those risks head on. In her first New York show since 2004 and her debut with Lori Bookstein Fine Art, Elena Sisto takes as her subject the predicaments of young women painters as they embark on their calling. In images that Sisto, in the tradition of Philip Guston, originates from pure acts of painting, her self-critical perseverance has produced work that is unique, psychologically complex, and moving.

Elena Sisto, like all serious painters, is a formalist. Behind her subject matter, part of the content of her work is the structure of the decisions that constitute painting. To emphasize this, about seven of the twenty paintings in this show are close-up details of her young painter subjects: blouses and patterns and fragments of hands and arms and necks. Each of these paintings becomes a mini universe of inventive facture as pigment turns into light and flesh, and patterns turn into fabric and paintings of paintings, but always revealing the mechanics of their construction from paint.

These “cropped in” paintings (as the artist calls them), deft and colorful, are almost abstract in their formalism. Paintings like Frogs, 2013, where negative spaces between elbows and torso become patterned triangles, may assuage viewers not willing to see the abstraction in the formal structures of the other, more psychological paintings. These are the ones that depict various young women struggling with the act of painting. The “cropped-in” paintings, amusing and exhilarating in their invention, gain in complexity through their context with what has remained “uncropped.”

And it is these paintings of young women wrestling with their intentions, which comprise the soul of this show. Because of the added implications in the way faces can signify feelings, the range of emotions is broader, the ambiguities more enticing, and the questions to be asked more probing.

In the masterful Self-Portrait (with Van Dongen), (2011) a painting filled with faces, the convergence of all Sisto’s painterly knowledge produces a heady concoction of formal, psychological, gender, and sexual issues. It may be a commonplace notion that a painter, especially a young one, is surrounded by a host of voices that she must listen to, battle with, ignore, or embrace, but this painting elucidates the idea in such a charmingly complex manner that it seems a revelation.

The picture depicts a white smocked young woman, right hand holding brushes, in the act of painting a self-portrait. Her smock is delineated with a few deft lines from a white wall tacked with painting reproductions, and the back of a canvas, as well as her ostensible reflection in a mirror bookends her. The eponymous Van Dongen of the title, a flame-hued and bare chested Jeune Arabe, 1910, peers haughtily at the painter over her shoulder and practically jumps off the canvas. Van Dongen is an apt choice for Sisto as the Dutchman’s paint handling and use of patterns clearly inform Sisto’s own work.

Head and body tilted in contrapusto to the Van Dongen, the young painter herself, with an expression of intense concentration, dominates the painting. Her face in shadow, her mouth forms a little brown hyphen, and in a supremely subtle painterly invention, Sisto lightens the shadow just above her mouth, to create the impression of her tongue pressing there intently.

The four dark brushes that our young heroine grasps form a Maltese cross  of vectors, which, along with her index and forefingers, extended Guston-style, point to the various voices/influences in the painting. Alongside the lithe Van Dongen Arab, a chunky, neo-classical Picasso maiden gazes earnestly at her. And up in the left corner, constituted by the merest blobs of color, are two women obliviously kissing in a passionate embrace. At the bottom, its little phallic head lasciviously poking into the picture is a tube of paint with the tiniest squirt of turquoise protruding from the tip. It is the same color and size as the tiny dot representing a fragment of blouse that appears behind — and defines the edge of — the girl’s right wrist.

But most importantly, occupying a gray trapezoid that cuts into the left fifth of the composition floats the spectral reflection of this artist herself, seemingly older, as if wonderingly peering at her younger self from the future. This little sleight of hand elucidates the irony of the “self-portrait” of the title. The painting depicts a young woman painting an image of her self. But like Velazquez’s Las Meninas, the only painting we actually see the front of is this very painting, which becomes Sisto’s own Joycean “portrait of the artist as a young woman.”

In what could be called the Bildungsmalen genre of painting, it is unique to see a female painter as protagonist. But aside from this feminist act of rectification, what makes these paintings unprecedented is that Sisto constructs a gaze for us that somehow becomes parental.

We regard these young women, not as the next hot young artists, but sympathetically, as daughters and students in the process of becoming. Though the art that Sisto has them making is usually abstract and a bit callow, she doesn’t mock them.  The very sympathy that these paintings elicit is what makes them so fresh. Youth becomes not a threat or admonition to the older viewers that are Sisto’s peers, but something to be fondly nurtured and encouraged, not despite but because of its awkwardness and lack of sophistication. And to her younger viewers Sisto offers the hope that painting can become a tool for understanding their relationship to the world, and that sophistication comes not from conforming but daring to be different.

The post Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: Elena Sisto at Lori Bookstein appeared first on artcritical.

This year’s fellowship awards from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation were presented to a total of 24 artists working in the field of Fine Arts; 14 artists in the category of Film-Video; 11 in Photography. The Fine Arts fellows include seven diverse painters, all women: Leigh Behnke, Cora Cohen, Harriet Korman, Carrie Moyer, Ann Pibal, Susan Wanklyn, and Elena Sisto. Cohen and Korman have been active since the 1960s. Cohen, known for her large-scale, dense and washy, mixed-media oil paintings, also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award in 2012. The Responsibility of Forms, an exhibition of her new paintings was recently at Guided By Invoices in New York, reviewed in these pages by David Rhodes.  Sisto, a long-time teacher at the School of Visual Arts, opens an exhibition of new work on April 25, titled Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow, at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, her first show with that gallery.  She describes her recent paintings as “centering around the artist’s experience of being in the studio, and the passage into adulthood of young women artists.”

Philip Kennicott chief art critic for The Washington Post, has received the Pulitzer Prize in the category of criticism this year for two long-format reviews of exhibitions, and one personal essay, all written in 2012. The three highlighted articles are: a critical analysis of the photography of Taryn Simon at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, a review of an exhibition at the National Building Museum devoted to the architect Kevin Roche, and an essay, titled “What Are We Losing in the Web’s Images of Suffering and Schadenfreude?” that examines our relationship to the over-abundance of disturbing and grotesque imagery found online and in-print. Kennicott, a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer, has been a critic for the Post since 1999.

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