Citizen 1 2026 – 80 x 65cm, acrylic, charcoal on canvas
Citizen 1 2026 is a major escalation in the extraction series, the first large-scale painting to fully realise the top-down surveillance grid I’ve been developing in the small drawings. At 80 × 65 cm the grid asserts itself as architecture: thick, uneven red-brown lines (drawn and painted, then dragged through wet acrylic) form a cage of rectangles that dominate the canvas, their intersections sharp yet hand-drawn, imperfect, human-made, yet inhuman in intent. The cells are not uniform; some are distorted, some bleed into each other, some contain only fragments of shadow or residue, reminding us that surveillance grids are not perfect abstractions, they are built, maintained, and enforced by fallible, violent systems.
The figure is walking diagonally, and positioned low in the lower-right cell, a dense knot of black and grey impasto that reads as both body and absence. The form is curled, almost fetal, head bowed, limbs folded, Giacometti’s attenuated walking man forced to the ground, no longer striding toward meaning but pinned by the overhead gaze. The paint is thick, gouged, scraped, rebuilt: charcoal dragged through wet acrylic leaves striations like thermal imaging artefacts or lidar point-cloud noise.
Green and yellow intrusions streak across the torso and grid lines, acidic, almost radioactive, evoking heat signatures, night-vision overlays, or the false-colour maps of drone targeting software. These are not hopeful flares; they are stains, leaks, the body marked by the very systems that locate it. The surrounding cells are mostly empty, yet haunted: faint shadows stretch across tiles, elongated by an unseen light source (dawn? dusk? floodlight?), betraying time of day, direction of movement, even emotional state. One cell contains only a smear of green, perhaps a previous figure erased, perhaps residual data. The grid is not neutral; it is active, oppressive, its lines cutting through the figure, bisecting limbs and torso, turning the human form into coordinates on a targeting map.
This painting synthesises the entire thematic arc: The pavement grid is the modern panopticon, updated by surveillance capitalism: every tile a data node, every shadow a timestamp, every posture a profile. Palantir’s AI tools for drone targeting in Gaza and its contracts with police forces (predictive policing, real-time data fusion) are the living embodiment of this evolution, Foucault’s unverifiable gaze made verifiable, total, and weaponised.
The figure is small relative to the grid, yet the impasto gives it density and weight, it refuses to become pure abstraction, yet it is already reduced to heat map, silhouette, target. The green streaks are not resistance; they are the afterimage of being seen. The grid is no longer a drawing; it is the subject. The citizen is no longer a person; it is a coordinate.
And the overhead view is merciless.