Yanis Varoufakis 2025 – 65 x 50cm, acrylic, charcoal on canvas
Yanis Varoufakis 2025 is the most physically commanding and emotionally unfiltered portrait in the entire series—a painting that feels like it has survived its own making, scarred and defiant, exactly as you intended. The face emerges from a brutal, churning field of black, grey, and bruised earth tones, with only the faintest intrusions of sickly green and ochre that read less as highlights and more as inflamed tissue or chemical burns. There is no flesh tone in the conventional sense; the head is built from the same degraded palette I’ve used throughout the Extraction works, raw umber, bone black, corpse white, ash grey, colors that evoke soil, tar, and weathered stone more than skin.
The result is a face that feels excavated rather than depicted: features gouged out of thick impasto, then scraped back, then rebuilt, layer after punishing layer, until the surface itself becomes a record of struggle. The eyes are the centre of gravity, narrowed, intense, cutting diagonally through the chaos with a gaze that anticipates every evasion, every bad-faith question. They are surrounded by deep craters of black and grey where the paint has been dragged and lifted, leaving ridges that catch light like scar tissue.
The mouth is open in a rictus of speech or shout, lips thick with accumulated paint, teeth suggested in raw white ridges that feel almost skeletal. The beard and hair are a single violent storm, charcoal and acrylic dragged downward in heavy, matted strands that merge with the radiating lines exploding outward from the skull, as if the force of thought is tearing the canvas apart.
The scraping and erasure are everywhere visible: long vertical drags where the knife has pulled wet paint across the face, thin veils of previous layers bleeding through, thick clots of residue pooling at the lower edge like waste or slag. The energy of the pencil drawings now translated into three-dimensional weight: impasto so heavy it casts real shadows across the surface.
This painting is the synthesis I’ve been building toward. The anonymous YouTubers dissolved into performance and noise; the named portraits (Finkelstein, Albanese, the earlier Varoufakis drawings) insisted on stubborn particularity. Here, the resistance becomes material: a face that has been fought for, eroded, and partially reclaimed, yet still stares back with the same sardonic clarity, the same refusal to be quiet. The radiating graphite storm of the drawings has become a radiating storm of paint, thought as physical force, argument as scar tissue.
This is portrait is uncompromising: a battle site fraught with desperation, energy and violence. The energy I wanted, the restless, non-representational force of the pencil drawings has been carried over intact, only now it has the weight, the gravity, the residue of paint to make it undeniable.
Varoufakis’s face has found its final, most brutal translator in this canvas. The refusal to be silenced is no longer an idea; it’s a surface that refuses to heal.