From a distance it seems to be a potholed road (perhaps seen in a rearview mirror), its surface littered with recycled oil color transfers. A ready-made out of the trashcan fits awkwardly in a sort of punishing embrace on a canvas that looks mildly disturbed by its presence. One remembers that the ready-made came out of a fit of anger against the hand of the visual artist and in its lying around embodies the hate of painting. It is hatred of painting. The first approach is thus to understand Stefan’s piece as an attempt to exact revenge on the ready-made, by redeeming it in an act of (self)irony. He takes it out of the garbage, or out of its being garbage (the condition of the ready-made itself) and throws it on the canvas, entrapping it in the visual logic of painting, making it a pseudo-narrative element, freezing it in a medium it wants nothing to do with.

Not that the painting wants or needs to entrap the ready-made in some quest for a materiality that a canvas couldn’t offer. It repels the piece of garbage that Stefan forces upon it. It rejects this all too concrete thing from its blurry dreamscape. An easy speculation would be to say that painting hates anything that captivates attention, anything that makes everything else, including paintings, fade into the background and become decorative. As every forgotten, ignored painting knows, in the end, a painting without attention is just a surface littered by garbage, a misused canvas, a lost chance at fame.             Text by Andrei Chitu