Yanis Varoufakis 2025 – 29 x 21cm, pencil on paper
Yanis Varoufakis is a portrait of coiled energy and quiet fury, a figure who looks like he’s holding back a torrent of words, or perhaps already speaking them under his breath while the world pretends not to hear.
Every pencil line is vibrating with the tension of someone who has spent years arguing against systems that refuse to yield. The cross-hatching is dense, almost violent in places, as if the pencil is pressing harder the longer it lingers on the face.
The eyes are the focal point: sharp, unblinking, rendered with a few decisive marks that cut through the surrounding chaos. They don’t stare at the viewer so much as through them, toward the next contradiction, the next evasion, the next crisis that needs naming.
The mouth is half-open, lips drawn taut, caught mid-sentence or mid-sigh; it’s the mouth of someone who has said “austerity is class war” so many times that the phrase has carved itself into the expression. The shoulders and upper chest are suggested rather than stated, dissolving into frantic scribbles that read as both protective aura and accumulating weight, decades of lectures, books, exiles, and the relentless extraction of hope from public discourse.
The torn paper edges and the faint horizontal line across the torso outline a makeshift podium. In the context of the Extraction/YouTuber series, this drawing becomes another node in the constellation of voices that refuse silence. Like Finkelstein and Albanese, Varoufakis is a named, specific resistor, someone who has been systematically marginalised, vilified, and yet keeps returning to the microphone, the podium, the live stream.