Woodys, Roses, an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Karine Fauchard (French b. 1976) and Rebecca Schiffman (American, b. 1982).

Over the course of recent years, Schiffman and Fauchard have each independently undertaken experiments in repetition in their work, intermittently revisiting a single subject over the course of a great many pieces. Schiffman, who lives in New York City, has been making portraits of Woody Allen. Working from commonly available photographs taken throughout the course of the filmmaker’s life, the artist’s small acrylic paintings cumulatively depict the man as a contemporary Mont Sainte Victoire, whose face, distributed through various media, is as much a staple of the Manhattanite’s visual diet as the distant mountain is of the villager dwelling in its foothills. The first of Schiffman’s works from this series was painted during her early student years, and since then, she has said, she has been trying to recapture the “balance of freedom and perfection that [she] struck in that painting,” a grace that, because it requires a certain degree of innocence, can never be attained in the same manner twice.

Fauchard, who lives in Vienna, has been making drawings of roses. Her unique depictions of the tired subject of the flower elides historical referentiality, and so avoids the expected tropes of irony or nostalgia, ensuring that awareness of the presence of artistic originality governs the viewing experience. Built up with the aid of a system of delicate graphic notations, and with a soundly functional structural undergirding left exposed, each finished composition holds the promise of revealing the universal principles and forces underlying the particular image reality has presented to the eye of the artist.

In Song Song, ten of Fauchard’s drawings of roses are matched with ten of Schiffman’s paintings of Allen, as part of the gallery’s program Luncheon.