Sibylle Peretti at Sylvia Schmidt - New Orleans - Brief Article

Sibylle Peretti's "Silent Children" are disconcerting. They derive from illustrations in 19th-century medical textbooks that present juvenile subjects then considered "monstrous" or abnormal (including twins) in the indulgent manner of the period. These children stare wildly, their oversized eyes gazing upward, eternally unblinking in an attitude that recalls contemporary Symbolism. For this elaborate, multipart installation, Peretti photocopied the illustrations and covered them with resin, thread, washes and glass.

In a gallery statement, Peretti describes her attempt to lend dignity to the images she appropriates. I would suggest rather that her achievement has been to recover the dignity which they were already given: an individuality that today would be evacuated in the name of scientific objectivity. There are no types or diagrams here but fully formed beings with clear sensibilities that are, to us, so strange as to command our attention.

Jimmy (mixed mediums on canvas with blown glass) shows a child who, with great calmness and certainty, appears to be drowning. It is Peretti herself who drowns this child, with veils of translucent resin and brief passages of transparent color. Glass bubbles seem to issue from the child's mouth and pile up on the gallery floor in a rough pyramid, bringing his fragile attempt at communication out from the picture plane and into our space, accusingly.

A number of pieces sharing the title "Small Works" were exhibited together as a grid. They are to be sold separately, which, while no doubt expedient, seems to me an error. Assembled in one work, the children in each unit may be understood as elements of a larger pattern, and a formal resolution that enhances the subject is achieved. In one particularly strong composition, twin girls stare at each other, heads bowed, eyes raised, the anxious space between their lips crossed by a double line of beads. The children seem to have a mutual understanding, while a superimposed flowering border emphasizes the pair's distance from the surface, from our world.

The overall effect of the show was surprising. The maudlin quality of the original illustrations together with the artist's watery manipulations yield a kind of quiet ecstasy. Peretti's children remind us that we diminish our humanity by turning a deaf ear to the very young. They underscore the value of communicating difference of all kinds. The artist's real achievement, however, is to offer these insights quietly and without exploitation.

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