Billionaire 2026 – 51 x 24cm, oil, acrylic on canvas
Billionaire 2026 is a small painting that feels like a deliberate act of reversal: a work that turns the upward gaze of the Extraction series back on the apex predator and exposes something raw and almost pitiful beneath the armour.
The vertical format amplifies the sense of exposure: the figure is tall and narrow, trapped in a narrow slit of canvas, unable to step sideways or retreat. The flesh is rendered in sickly, cadaverous pinks and whites, skin that looks both too thin and too exposed, as if the body has been stripped of its usual armour (the suit, the podium, the screen). The towel is a pale, rumpled band across the midsection, not luxurious but makeshift, clinging awkwardly.
The posture is casual yet tense, arms folded or resting, head slightly tilted, expression caught in a moment of unguarded half-smile or grimace. The eyes are shadowed, the mouth parted; it’s not a confident grin, but something more uncertain, almost embarrassed.
The background is a muted, scratched brown-grey void, abrasive, uninviting, with faint vertical drags and smears that suggest both prison bars and the grid of data extraction. The black mark at the bottom left feels like a stain or a shadow that refuses to be cleaned up, a dark undercurrent that follows the figure even in this moment of supposed relaxation.
This painting refuses to caricature or satire. It doesn’t mock the body; it exposes it. Instead, I treat it with the same unflinching seriousness as the YouTubers, the citizens, the mayor: the body under scrutiny, the self under extraction, the person reduced to flesh when the performance is stripped away.
The pink skin is not erotic or vulnerable in a sentimental way; it is clinical, almost forensic, the billionaire as asset, as data point, as something that can be photographed, shared, and consumed like anyone else.
In the Extraction series, this is the logical extension of the upward gaze. The billionaires in the Two Billionaires drawing were frantic, dominant, still in control of the frame.
Here, the billionaire is subjected to the same logic he has profited from: visibility as vulnerability, the private moment made public, the body turned into content. The towel is not a joke; it is a symbol of momentary disarming, the one moment when the extractor is extracted, the watcher is watched, the sovereign is naked.
The narrow format intensifies the confinement: the figure is trapped in a vertical slit, unable to escape the gaze. The painting refuses to let him remain abstract or untouchable; it drags him into the same scarred, provisional space as everyone else. The pink flesh is the inflammation of being seen too much, too closely, too permanently, even in a moment of supposed privacy.
The painting is restrained, but quietly savage. It doesn’t gloat; it observes. And the observation is merciless. The billionaire is not outside the machine; he is inside it, just like the rest of us.