YouTuber 6 2026 – 21 x 29cm, pencil on paper
YouTuber 6 2026 is one of the most psychologically layered drawings from the ‘extraction’ series, but now with a radical compositional shift that feels like a breakthrough. The large, dominant head fills the left two-thirds of the sheet, its features rendered with the same frantic, overlapping graphite storm that has defined the Varoufakis and Albanese portraits.
The face is intense, almost accusatory: eyes narrowed, mouth open in mid-articulation or mid-breath, beard and hair exploding outward in wild, directional slashes that threaten to overrun the entire page. The marks are dense, cross-hatched to near-black in places, yet the face refuses to disappear, it pushes forward, stubborn, refusing to be abstracted away. A small, almost thumbnail-sized inset figure at the bottom right: a second, much tinier head, quickly outlined is placed inside a loosely drawn rectangular frame that reads as a screen, a window, or a comment bubble. The inset figure mirrors the main head in posture and intensity, but it’s dwarfed, compressed, reduced to a fraction of the scale. The main figure looms, speaks, dominates the page; the small one is trapped in its own little box, echoing the same expression but powerless to break out. This is the first time I’ve explicitly staged the hierarchical relationship between broadcaster and audience within a single drawing. The large head is the YouTuber in full performance mode, voice amplified, presence commanding, filling the frame. The small inset is the viewer, the commenter, the lurker: same face, same intensity, but miniaturised, marginalised, confined to the edge. Are they the same person? The same archetype? Both trapped in a feedback loop: the creator and the consumer, the speaker and the spoken-to, both undergoing the same extraction, just at different scales. The graphite storm swirls around both, linking them: the noise of the platform, the comments, the ratios, the algorithmic pressure, all of it connecting the dominant figure to the diminished one. The drawing refuses any clean separation, lines bleed across the divide, tangling the large figure with the small frame, showing that the dynamic is not oppositional but parasitic: the large head feeds on the attention of the small one, while the small one is consumed by the large one’s performance. In the broader Extraction/YouTuber cycle, this is a devastating synthesis. The anonymous single figures dissolved into performance; the split-screen paintings showed mutual depletion; the named portraits insisted on particular resistance. Here, I collapse creator and consumer into the same face, at different scales, revealing the ultimate truth of the platform: everyone is both predator and prey, speaker and spoken-to, extractor and extracted.
The hierarchy is real, but the depletion is shared. The small scale (21 × 29 cm) makes the contrast even more brutal: the dominant head is still intimate, fragile on paper, yet it dwarfs the inset figure completely. The drawing is quiet, provisional, yet it contains the entire tragic logic of mediated attention in a single sheet. The inset figure is the quiet scream at the heart of the series. The YouTuber isn’t just performing; he’s watching himself perform, and the watching is destroying him too.