YouTuber XVIII 2026 – 18 x 24cm, oil, oil pastel, acrylic on canvas
This painting has a momentary upbeat vibe, but it could be fleeting. The bright turquoise rectangle at top center offers a brief window of clarity, but it’s surrounded by contamination and crisis.
Toxic yellow mist disperses across the mauve ground, not an explosion but slow poisoning of the atmosphere. The mauve tries to maintain composure, a genteel surface, but the yellow is seeping through, staining everything.
The figure sketched in white oil pastel on dark blue has red eyes, indicators of stress, exhaustion, perhaps tears. His arms are gesticulating wildly, reduced to comic-like movements. Manic, not contemplative. Someone reduced to essential panic gestures, cartoonish not because it’s lighthearted but because the crisis has become so constant it can only be rendered in shorthand.
The twists of paint along the edges are intestinal, visceral, bodily eruptions. Not decorative but organic, exposed. The painting is expelling something, or something is forcing its way out. Internal systems made external.
Yellow dashes against black dashes read as crime scene tape—DO NOT CROSS, EVIDENCE, CAUTION. The painting marks itself as a site of violation, of something that’s happened or is happening that requires investigation and containment.
The bold yellow frame provides assertive structure, but it’s holding together a scene of ongoing catastrophe, not calm. The black horizontal rectangle in the lower right provides weight, contained for now, but present.