YouTuber XIX 2026 – 13 x 18cm, oil, acrylic on canvas
The smallest YouTuber painting so far, but possibly the most concentrated. At 13 x 18cm, the intimacy of scale makes the chaos feel even more claustrophobic, concentrated crisis held in your hand.
The dark blue inset panel shows a scratched-out head with what appears to be the head of a microphone in front of the face. The person is subsumed by the apparatus of broadcast, the face literally obscured by the tool of their own performance. The microphone isn’t just present, it’s blocking, interrupting, replacing the face. Identity consumed by function. That red circular form near the mouth could be another microphone element, an open mouth, a wound, the only warm color accent, a small point of heat or alarm.
The upper left of the blue inset houses another window with another person inside it. No distinguishing features can be made out. Picture-in-picture-in-picture, observers observing observers, no clear hierarchy. Everyone is simultaneously broadcasting and being broadcast, watching and being watched.
The surrounding structures of disjointed windows are made up of alternating lumps of acrylic paint—worm-like, intestinal eruptions in blue, yellow, orange, green, turquoise. They stray into the main inset frame as if to swallow it up. The frame is being actively consumed by its own infrastructure. These aren’t decorating the edges, they’re invading, colonizing, overwhelming the content they’re supposed to contain.
The painting enacts exactly what happens with corporate sovereignty and zonification: borders that don’t protect but proliferate and devour. The off-white ground visible around the edges feels less like relief and more like the void these structures are expanding into. There’s nowhere that isn’t being colonized by this system of frames-within-frames, each one trying to contain while simultaneously unable to hold.
This isn’t simplification but compression. All the themes are here: extraction, nested surveillance, infrastructure consuming content, bodies reduced to broadcast functions, zones proliferating without organizing. A microcosm of systemic collapse.