In "I'm starting with you" (2023), Deborah Roberts constructs a monumental confrontation, 213.4 by 213.4 centimeters of acrylic, graphite, pastel, ink, and collage working in concert across the canvas. A young Black boy emerges from a deep, enveloping darkness, spot-lit with an intensity that transforms the picture plane into something closer to a stage or a reckoning. His outstretched palm faces the viewer directly, a gesture that is simultaneously protective and defiant, refusing passivity and demanding that the figure in front of the work account for what they are seeing. Roberts has long worked within the tension between visibility and erasure, and here the dark ground is not a void of absence so much as a charged field, one that requires the viewer to genuinely look, to work toward recognizing a humanity that should never have required effort to perceive in the first place. The work belongs to a new body of paintings developed for Roberts' solo exhibition "What about us?" presented in New York in late 2023, and it represents a meaningful evolution within her practice. Where earlier compositions used the absence of contextual space to liberate her subjects from the weight of history and the distorting pressures of the white gaze, this figure commands his surroundings with a new authority. The boy does not simply occupy the canvas; he holds it. His gaze sustains a kind of interrogation directed outward, turning the customary dynamic of spectatorship on its head and insisting on reciprocity. Roberts has described wanting viewers to work hard before the black paintings, to pursue the humanity within them, and to find that once recognized, it cannot be unfamiliar again. For collectors, this signed and framed large-scale work represents Roberts at a pivotal moment of artistic deepening. Her collage-based technique, layering found imagery with drawing and paint, fragments and reassembles the body in ways that speak to broader histories of how Black identity has been constructed, fractured, and reclaimed. "I'm starting with you" is both a title and a declaration, positioning the child not as subject to outside definition but as the origin point, the place where a more honest and demanding conversation about race, visibility, and power must begin.