Mayor 2026 – 29 x 21cm, pencil on paper
Mayor 2026 is a claustrophobic pivot in the series, one that takes the familiar YouTuber split-screen logic and turns it into something far more oppressive and intimate. By zooming in on the central head and letting it dominate the sheet, I’ve stripped away the breathing room of the earlier compositions. The face is massive, almost suffocating the page, eyes wide and unblinking, mouth open in a frozen shout or gasp.
The pencil marks are dense, frantic, cross-hatched to near-black in places, creating a texture that feels less like drawing and more like pressure applied directly to the skull. The hair and background dissolve into the same chaotic storm, no clear separation between person and noise, self and feed. The figure is no longer performing outward; it is being crushed inward by the very visibility it once sought.
The inset figure in the lower left, small, frantic, also mid-shout, now reads as a kind of trapped echo chamber within the chamber. The smaller head is not just a viewer or reactor; it is the same person, miniaturised, screaming back at itself through the screen.
The vertical divide between the two is no longer a clean split-screen line; it is a jagged, bleeding wound where the large face bleeds into the small one, the small one bleeds back. The microphone cables or framing lines that once connected them now feel like sutures trying (and failing) to hold the self together.
This change in format, from wide horizontal split to vertical, zoomed-in dominance amplifies the psychological toll.
The earlier drawings gave the viewer distance; this one removes it. The face is too close, too big, too raw. There is nowhere to look away. The mayor (or whoever this figure stands for) is no longer addressing a crowd or a feed; he is trapped in the feedback loop of his own performance, the audience reduced to a tiny, frantic version of himself staring back from the corner of his own screen.
In the Extraction series, this drawing feels like the moment the performer finally realises the extraction is complete. The large head is still speaking, still gesturing, but the speaking is hollow, only the signal remains, looping in miniature while the source dissolves. The change from horizontal to vertical format turns the work from a diagram of mutual depletion into a portrait of solitary implosion.
The torn paper edges and raw quality make it feel like a leaked still from a live stream that’s already being scrubbed from the platform. Yet the density of the marks insists on being seen.
The zoom-in doesn’t magnify power; it magnifies the trap. The mayor is not leading; he is being led by his own image, and there is no exit from the frame.