NEW YORK: Elena Sisto at Littlejohn Contemporary

Art in America, June, 1999 by Eleanor Heartney

The hallowed innocence of childhood takes another hit in these fairy-tale-derived paintings by Elena Sisto. Looming much too close in the modest-sized canvases, the familiar figures of the winsome princess, the stalwart prince, the gallant hero and the peevish lady-in-waiting take on sinister airs.

Sisto has painted her cast of characters with broad, sweeping brushstrokes. The strokes appear to have been lightly wiped after application in a way that obliterates details and gives the images an oddly out-of-focus quality. As a result, certain details--sensuous red lips, white eye slits, a dark shadow across the cheeks--are emphasized at the expense of the whole. Meanwhile, Sisto's tendency to place these generalized faces off center so that sides and tops are cut off by the canvas edge gives them a cinematic monumentality.

For all their apparent simplicity, the paintings are oddly compelling. The blandness of these stock characters is colored with cruelty, calculation and venal sensuality. Sleeping Beauty, for instance, is far from the somnambulant virgin of Disney. Her ruby lips and unnaturally red cheeks are set on a face which has a greenish cast, and her heavy-lidded eyes are open slits coolly appraising the viewer. Prince Charming, meanwhile, has a low forehead beneath his bowl haircut, and his eyes are a tad too far apart, giving him an aura of brutality and stupidity. Valiant fares no better, with thick pouting lips, a low brow and greased-back hair.

The only painting which offers more than a head and shoulders is Giant's Son. Here we seem to be looking up over a bulging stomach with an exposed belly button toward a distant mindless head. One imagines that he is the ostensible villain of the piece, but he seems no better or worse than the heroes and heroines.

Sisto is certainly not the first person to delve into the hidden subtext of fairy tales. Bruno Bettlehiem and other scholars have revealed that these little morality plays teem with Freudian undercurrents. Still, Sisto gives the familiar figures a striking characterization. And her wry cynicism is a bracing antidote to the sentimentalizing of childhood that seems so pervasive in politics and entertainment today. It's good to be reminded again that purity is an illusion even for storybook characters.