YouTuber 10 2026 – 21 x 29cm, pencil on paper
YouTuber 10 2025 is one of the more formally elegant drawings in the entire series, a small sheet that feels like the moment the performance finally breaks, yet the broadcast refuses to stop.
The central figure, a woman with long hair dominates the frame, seated or leaning forward, eyes half-closed, expression caught in a fragile limbo between exhaustion and resignation. Her features are rendered with tender brutality: soft, smudged pencil lines that suggest rather than define, the face emerging from a haze of cross-hatching and erasure. The hair falls in heavy, restless strands, framing her face like a curtain that cannot quite shield her from the gaze. The posture is intimate, almost confessional, shoulders rounded, head slightly bowed, yet the act is public: she is speaking, or has been speaking, into the void of the feed.
The inset figure on the left houses a smaller head (a bearded man) is trapped in a roughly drawn circular or rectangular frame, headphones on, mouth open, mid-sentence, eyes intense. The inset is not cleanly drawn; the pencil lines bleed across their frames, tangling with the main figure’s hair and background, showing that the loop is total: no inside/outside, no separation between who speaks and who consumes. The graphite storm is subdued here, less violent than in earlier works, more like a slow suffocation. The marks swirl and overlap, but they also fade, thin out, dissolve into the paper.
The central woman is not yet gone, but she is fading, her presence leaching away while the insets keep talking, keep performing, keep feeding the same cycle that is erasing her. This drawing feels like the quiet aftermath of the earlier, more explosive YouTuber pieces. Where those showed the performer dominating the frame or the crowd dissolving under the grid, this one shows the individual performer collapsing inward while the broadcast continues in miniature, perpetual, indifferent to the cost. It ties directly to surveillance capitalism’s logic: the self is extracted through visibility until only the signal remains, looping in tiny windows while the source fades.
Yet the drawing insists on being seen: the woman’s face, though softened, still holds the eye; the insets still speak. The performance doesn’t end when the performer breaks; it simply shrinks and continues elsewhere. The woman disappears, the signal persists, and the extraction rolls on.