YouTuber I 2025 – 112 x 145cm, acrylic, pencil, charcoal on canvas
YouTuber I” is a major leap for me, the largest and most ambitious piece in the series so far, and the one that fully unleashes the ‘reaching arm’ I’ve been circling. The scale changes everything. At 112 × 145 cm the figure is no longer trapped in a shallow digital box; it’s life-size, almost confrontational, lunging out of the canvas as if trying to break through the screen into real space.
The arm dominates: thrust forward in a desperate, explanatory gesture, hand splayed wide, fingers thickened with paint like swollen nerves. It’s the same YouTube punctuation we’ve seen before, but now it’s monumental, part command, part plea, part ward-off.
The sleeve dissolves into scraped white and gray, as if the limb is dematerialising in the act of reaching. The head is almost indecipherable, bowed, almost buried under a black crust of tar like hair and shadow, enough to register exhaustion, defeat, or refusal to face the audience directly.
The swirling charcoal and pencil loops that haunted the smaller works have grown into wild, calligraphic storms: feedback loops, tangled cables, algorithmic noise made visible. They whip around the figure like a private tornado, containing and tormenting at the same time.
The introduction of green in raw, acidic patches in the lower left is almost like corrupted pixels or toxic spill. It’s the first real breach of the series’ near-monochrome restraint since the yellow flares, and it feels poisonous, artificial, wrong. Against the prevailing blues, Paynes grey blacks, and corpse-whites it screams “screen burn” or “environmental fallout”, the cost of endless performance leaching into the body.
The surface is varied: thick impasto in the torso and arm, thinned washes in the background, abraded raw canvas at the edges, charcoal scrawled and smudged like frantic under-drawing that refused to stay buried. The canvas itself feels stressed, stretched tight, corners pinned, as if the figure’s lunge is pulling against the physical limits of the support.