Last but not least, The Chosen One: nine chairs lined up across the surface of the panel, divided by colored lines into groups of two, three, and four. Each chair is different, individualized in its minimalism, but the central chair - the smallest - is marked by a blood-red seat. The white encaustic surface is particularly richly textured in this painting, making suggestive ectoplasmic trails behind the drawn imagery, laying bare the unconscious determinants of all choices. Who is the chosen? What is the significance of the blood-red seat that apparently indicates election? Here again, a certain irony asserts itself. Is being chosen always a good thing? In this work, especially, one is made aware of the importance of Friedberg’s drawing in establishing the ambiguous atmosphere of the piece. The artist refuses all prettiness, all elegance in her understated, reduced but expressive line, a line that always bears the traces of the hand that made it. In some ways, the encaustic background, pitted and irregular, has more material weight than the frail, linear subjects of the piece. But then again, the chairs, individuated though they may be, are also constituted of small geometries, a series of rectangles across the horizontal main division or “floor line” of the painting. Once again, one wonders about the identity of the Chosen One? Is it Goldilocks? The Jews? The newest member of the Académie Française? Or is it meant as a meditation on choice in general, choice which may be fatal or glorious or both at the same time?