Eric Stefanski: Look Me In The Eye

The work that built Eric Stefanski's reputation drew its force from self-awareness turned sideways: anxious, sharp, ruthlessly honest about the private experience of being alive. This group of paintings does something different. These new works are more exposed. I Can't Stop Thinking About You, Look Me In The Eye, This Is All We Need, and I Hope This Feelings Last are not confessions about the self in isolation. They reach across toward another person. Where the earlier works turned inward, these are addressed outward. The subject is not ego or existential humor but connection: the wanting of it, the fragility of it, the rare moments when it almost feels like enough.

It Always Get Better and Enjoy Your Life carry a different weight than their phrasing might suggest. In Stefanski's hands these are not platitudes. They are statements made under pressure, the kind of thing you say to someone and mean so much it becomes its own vulnerability. Crying and Dancing holds both states at once without resolving either. Fuck stands alone as the shortest and possibly the most honest thing in the room. What holds the collection together is what has always made Stefanski's practice worth following: the distance between how simple the language looks and how much it actually carries. Large-scale, painted in oil and acrylic on canvas, these works stop you the way a direct look from across a room does.