In what’s been called a campaign of “retro-appropriation,” Brooklyn artist Dan Fischer minutely reproduces his favorite photographs in pencil, working over a chessboard-like grid that lets him abstract the images from their iconic personal and cultural context. The resulting texture is often described in terms reminiscent of Spanish devotional portraiture — “velvety,” “monkish,” and above all “hagiographic” — subverting the notion that in an era of theoretically infinitely reproducible art, every appropriation of an existing (readymade) image is somehow “postmodern” or at least pop. Rather than callow copies of copies, these images seem reanimated through love.

(Appearing at the Derek Eller Gallery in New York City through December 19.)