YouTuber 1 2025 – 21 x 28cm, acrylic, pencil on paper
The ‘YouTuber’ works on paper are the most fragile and exposed works from the ‘extraction’ series, an abrupt shift from the heavy impasto of the Extraction heads and the scarred concrete of the Amare construction site, Den Haag into something almost weightless, spectral, and nerve-exposed.
The paper itself becomes part of the subject: thin, vulnerable, barely able to hold the paint without buckling. Where the canvases were battered and built-up like geological strata, these sheets feel like skin that has been flayed and left to dry. The dark grey acrylic is applied in broad, washy drags and clots, but sparingly, never enough to fully cover or protect the ground. The pencil lines underneath (frantic, looping, scribbled) show through like a nervous system laid bare, or like the endless scroll of comments, thumbnails, and algorithmic noise that surrounds the figure.
The figures themselves are barely there. In both works the “YouTuber” is a ghost: a face half-emerging from the dark, eyes wide but unfocused, mouth suggested rather than stated. The swirling graphite coils around the head read simultaneously as headphones, microphones, tangled cables, or the feedback loops of echo chambers, content feeding on itself, gesture multiplied into infinity.
The arms (especially in YouTuber 1) are starting to appear: tentative reaching marks, fingers splayed in that familiar explanatory wave, but dissolving before they can complete the motion. As the sense of entrapment looms, a crisis of mediation sets in.
The Extraction heads were bodies under physical and political siege; Amare was the civic body hollowed out. These YouTubers are consciousnesses under digital siege, extracted from embodied presence, reduced to signal, gesture, and residue. The black masses feel less like tar or ash now and more like pixel bleed, screen burn, or the void of the unlit camera lens. The paper’s emptiness around the figure is no longer raw canvas breathing; it’s the infinite scroll, the white void of the interface waiting to be filled with the next take.
The pencil work devolves from loose figurative approximations into looping, obsessive lines, a repetitive language emptying itself of content, the closest the drawing can register the anxiety of performance itself: the need to keep moving, keep gesturing, keep producing content while knowing it will vanish into the feed or be demonetised, debunked, or drowned out. The marks feel compulsive, like someone talking faster and faster to stay audible.
These YouTubers are pathos, private/public consciousness as commodity, reaching into a void that reaches back only to harvest.
The drawings are quieter, smaller, more intimate, but no less devastating. The violence has turned inward and virtual: extraction not of flesh or wealth but of attention, presence, interiority.
The figure isn’t being buried under paint; it’s being dissolved by its own performance. On paper, indecipherable messages are scratched on the wall of the echo chamber.
The extraction series needed this to evolve: the body, the building, and now the broadcast self, all undergoing the same logic of extraction.