YouTuber X 2026 – 18 x 24cm, acrylic on canvas
At 18 x 24cm, YouTuber X is almost intimate, like a manuscript page or a personal relic, not much smaller than the average laptop screen, yet it contains all the violence and surveillance architecture of the larger works compressed into miniature form.
Two ghostly white-grey figures glow against the deep burgundy-black ground like figures seen through night-vision, or souls trapped in digital amber. The left figure is larger, more present but dissolving downward in vertical streaks. The right figure is contained in a small rectangular frame, reduced, compressed, but oddly more intact, like a thumbnail image.
The burgundy-maroon ground is new in the series, darker and richer than the greys and blacks, with a baroque quality, like old master painting or dried blood. It creates a completely different atmosphere than the toxic greens and cyans or the institutional ochres. This feels more elegiac, funereal, like I’m painting ghosts or afterimages rather than active performers.
The central barrier, a thick black vertical divider with white paint breaking through creates the split-screen architecture, but at this scale it reads almost like a chain or a seam, something that both separates and binds the two figures together. The white breaking through the black could be light leaking between worlds, or data corrupting at the join.
No color intrusions, save for a few quiet traces of dark blue over the main characters. These two spectral presences in dark space, barely visible, barely holding form.
The small scale makes it feel private, diaristic, like what we see when we close our eyes after hours of watching content, the afterimages burned into your retinas.
Two figures, one larger and dissolving, one small and framed, both glowing faintly in the darkness.