Three YouTubers 2026 – 40 x 40cm, oil, acrylic, oil pastel, pencil, on canvas
This painting puts the attention economy of alternative news podcasts through a painterly filter cognizant of a whole lexicon of material equivalents. The language of the attention economy finds its correlates: the network state, the tech broligarchy, YouTubers’ endless feeds combating MSM, corporate overreach, zonification, the illusion of democracy, the feudal nature of free zones, the carve-outs, the patchworks of corporate sovereignties.
Drawing is incorporated throughout, pencil, pastel, and paint coexist as competing systems. The two inset frames are at siege from an overload of boundary edges, disjointed, fracturing, struggling to hold up a system. Multiple nested rectangles press against each other like Special Economic Zones and charter cities, territorial logics that refuse integration, borders that don’t contain but proliferate.
The material nature of the painting is a kind of abject terrain where the posthuman debate and digital echo chambers have become bodily, flesh, internalized and externalized through paint. The aggressive yellow ground, the corrupted toolbar across the top, the vertical stripes attempting failed structure, these are not representations but material equivalents of systemic breakdown.
The lack of discussion about these zones, about charter cities and corporate sovereignties, finds its parallel in figures under siege, suffocated by competing frames. The collapse of our democratic political institutions, the breaking apart of the rule of law, everything crumbling under a form of second empire building, is enacted through paint that won’t stay contained, boundaries that multiply without organizing, a system actively suffocating what it’s meant to display.
The square format offers no escape. The pressure is equal from all sides, like living within overlapping jurisdictions where no authority holds and all authorities extract.