Millionaire 2026 – 28 x 27cm, oil, acrylic on canvas
Millionaire 2026 is a small painting on stretched canvas of a partial head. This isn’t a clean cut; it’s a slow, messy recession, the paint scraped back, thinned, allowed to bleed into the institutional grey ground until the boundary between subject and background collapses. The face is no longer whole; it is being unmade in real time, half-present, half-absent, as if the very act of being painted (or being visible) is accelerating its depletion.
Parts of the head remain remains stubbornly legible, flushed cheeks, pale skin, intense blue eyes staring out, but the upper part has already surrendered to the void. The asymmetry creates a visceral unease: we are watching a person disappear before our eyes, and the disappearance is not dramatic or sudden; it is quiet, inevitable, bureaucratic.
The interplay with the grey ground is now the painting’s true subject. The grey isn’t neutral backdrop; it’s active, invasive, institutional, exactly the colour of corporate boardrooms, server farms, security camera feeds, government forms. It seeps into the face, bleeds from the edges of the surviving half, swallows the missing half. The head is both emerging from this grey fog and being pulled back into it, suspended in a liminal state between presence and erasure. The pink-red flush on the cheeks and around the nostrils reads less as inflammation now and more as the last traces of life force leaking out before the grey takes over completely. The nostrils, are reminiscent of a pigs snout, and grotesque in this context: the final animal remnant on a face that is otherwise being abstracted into data.
The processes of extraction I have been exploring in this series is a bit more mysterious here. There is no obvious wound, no dramatic violence, just the slow, inexorable spread of grey, the quiet subtraction of substance. It evokes the way wealth and power extract not just resources but personhood: the millionaire is not destroyed outright; he is gradually leached, hollowed, reduced to a half-face that still stares, still exists, but only partially.
The grey ground is the ultimate extractor; silent, patient, totalising. This head has moved closer to dissolution: the subject is no longer caught off-guard; he is being systematically unmade, and the unmaking is almost complete. The small square-ish format intensifies the claustrophobia: no room to breathe, no peripheral vision, just the face pressed against the edges, half-gone already.
The frayed canvas edges and visible weave add to the sense of fragility, this is a portrait of a process that is still ongoing. In the broader Extraction series, this painting is a quiet yet forensic examination of those millionaires and billionaires who wield extraordinary power over our governance systems.
The head is emerging and receding at once, and soon there will be only the grey. It doesn’t shout; it whispers the end.