Matt Kennard 2026 – 21 x 29cm, pencil on paper
Matt Kennard 2026 is a fierce, necessary addition to the Extraction series, one that feels like the pencil has been wielded with the same relentless conviction Kennard brings to his own work. The portrait is dense, almost claustrophobic: the head caught mid-sentence, exploding outward in a frenzied storm of graphite that threatens to overrun the edges. The marks are urgent, overlapping, scratched and re-scratched, cross-hatching so heavy in places that the paper is dented, while the image itself emerges from heavily erased marks. This is not a contemplative likeness; it is an attack on the surface, mirroring the way Kennard attacks the silences of power: no quarter given, no smoothing over, no polite distance. The face emerges from the chaos, eyes alert and in focus, mouth set in a line of grim determination, features carved out through sheer insistence rather than gentle description.
The intensity is palpable: this is the face of someone who has spent years digging into the underbelly of corporate-state collusion, refusing to look away even when the brick walls are at their highest. In the context of the Extraction/YouTuber cycle, this drawing occupies a crucial hinge point. The anonymous YouTubers dissolved into performance and algorithmic noise; the named resistors (Finkelstein, Albanese, Varoufakis) were portraits of stubborn particularity under siege. Kennard bridges both: he is an author and journalist who operates in the public sphere, using the same tools of visibility (writing, speaking, publishing) that many YouTubers commodify, yet he does so in service of revelation rather than monetisation.
His work on Special Economic Zones, those deregulated enclaves where democracy is secretly suspended in favour of corporate sovereignty, is central to my own research, and this portrait embodies that shared refusal to accept the official narrative.
The frenzied attack on the paper is the visual equivalent of Kennard’s method: keep digging, keep scratching, keep exposing, even when the establishment tries to bury the story. The small scale (21 × 29 cm) makes the drawing feel urgent, like a leaked document or a whistleblower’s note, the density of marks compunding that urgency. Kennard’s encouragement during my own moments of hitting brick walls is deeply felt here: the portrait is not just admiration; it is reciprocity. I am drawing him the way he writes, uncompromisingly, insistently, refusing to let the subject disappear into abstraction or silence.
This is one of the most personally charged drawings in the series. It depicts a journalist who, in my opinion, is the natural inheritor of exemplars like John Pilger, someone who never let the establishment silence them, while demonstrating commitment, against all odds, to the act of investigation itself: the slow, stubborn, often thankless work of revealing what power would prefer to keep hidden.