A Theater of Faces

Ricco/Maresca Gallery is proud to present Franne Davids: A Theater of Faces, the second gallery exhibition devoted to the late Connecticut painter (1950-2022). Following her revelatory debut in 2024, this new presentation focuses entirely on her portraits--many of them self-portraits--painted in oil on paper with an intensity that borders on incantation. Davids spent her life working in near-total isolation, transforming her basement studio into a private stage where imagination and memory intertwined. In these small, electric images, faces emerge from fields of dense pattern and luminous color: yellow skin, red garments, black eyes that look both inward and beyond. Each figure feels inhabited--an apparition, a stand-in, a fragment of the artist herself. What Davids achieved, without audience or instruction, is a deeply personal form of expressionism that fuses restraint and excess, tenderness and strangeness. Her theater of faces is less about likeness than presence--each painting a vivid record of looking and being looked at. Seen together, they reveal an artist who, in solitude, built an extraordinary visual language of empathy, defiance, and wonder.