Two YouTubers 2026 – 50 x 80cm, acrylic, charcoal on canvas
Two YouTubers 2026 escalates the division that plagues our global discourse, the painting utilises the split-screen motif, now rendered at full scale with full emotional brutality.
The formal divide down the center is a brutal vertical gash, which operates like a split screen, but also like a wound or a mirror. The left figure screams into the void with that corroded mouth-hole, eyes like toxic pools, the whole face seeming to melt forward in desperation. The right withdraws into shadows, face barely holding its structure, those vertical drips suggesting tears, exhaustion, or dissolution.
The painting moved from a grey state to documenting overstimulation and technological violence (by layering color). The cyan and magenta aren’t natural or warm, they’re digitally synthetic, the colors of interfaces, alerts and targeting systems. They make the “YouTuber” dimension a primary framework: these are people being processed through chromatic overload, thumbnail optimization, the attention economy’s demand for ‘MORE’, more color, more intensity, more stimulation to break through the scroll.
The final decision to add color also mirrors how digital images get processed, filters applied, saturation cranked up, images “enhanced” for engagement. I literally did to the painting what platforms do to content: took something raw and made it louder, brighter, more eye-catching, but also more toxic. Centuries ago, painters would begin their works in grisaille on a monochrome ground, colour was the last thing to be added via oil glazes. When I work with colour the intention isn’t to beautify or decorate, it is to contaminate the image with chromatic violence.
Texture itself becomes content. The scraping, the buildup, the ghost marks perform a parallel labour. These aren’t slick, finished surfaces; they’re documents of struggle, revision, desperation. The painting shows the extraction process in its own skin.
The fact that I’m making this work while actively researching charter cities and free zones as @europeanpowell means the paintings aren’t illustrations of ideas; they’re parallel investigations. The research documents how extraction operates at the policy/infrastructure level. The paintings document how it feels, how it costs, what it leaves behind.
Emotional and political expenditure is exactly what the impasto records. The thickness of the paint, the accumulated labour visible in every scrape and rebuild, it’s not just texture; it’s expenditure made visible. Each painting documents its own cost of production, which mirrors the cost of producing political speech under platform conditions.
The “extraction” theme is embodied by these figures who themselves have been mined for content, attention, reaction. They’re both perpetrators and victims of the attention economy, performing, consuming, being consumed. Cyan and magentas feel like the only “live” signals in a dead broadcast, like warning lights on failing machinery. The two heads are locked in the same horizontal canvas, divided by a jagged, charcoal-and-paint rift. The division is not clean or symmetrical; it’s torn, bleeding black and grey across the boundary, hair and scribbles tangling into one continuous field of interference. The left figure (the woman) is in mid-cry or mid-shout: mouth wide open, teeth bared in raw white ridges, eyes wide and green-tinged behind scratched lenses, expression a mix of fury, pain, and desperate insistence. The right figure is quieter, more collapsed: eyes narrowed, mouth a dark smear, face half-dissolved into the surrounding storm, as if the fight has already been lost or simply exhausted.