YouTubers 1 2025 – 15,5 x 23cm, pencil on paper
YouTubers 1 is a quiet but decisive escalation in the ‘extraction’ series, the first time I’ve explicitly doubled the figure into the familiar YouTube split-screen format translating the platform’s own visual grammar into a parallel language. The two heads are placed side by side, separated by a vertical graphite seam that reads as both a literal divide and a metaphorical one. The format is stripped of its usual bombast, no bold text overlays, no arrows, no emojis, just two faces emerging from the same storm of frantic, overlapping pencil marks.
The left figure (the woman) is more defined: eyes wide, mouth slightly parted, hair falling in heavy, restless strands. She looks alert, perhaps mid-sentence, caught in the act of responding or challenging. The right figures closely cropped head is more abstracted, features half-dissolved into the surrounding scribbles, eyes narrowed, mouth a tight line. The division between them is not clean; the graphite strokes bleed across the central line, tangling hair, scribbles, and shadows into one continuous field of interference. The “split” is real, but it’s also illusory, the two are already enmeshed, already echoing each other in the same chaotic loop.