YouTuber IX 2026 – 24 x 40cm, acrylic, pencil, wire on canvas
This painting has literally stratified into layers of operation, with the image-making happening in the upper register (pencil drawing, minimal paint) and the material consequence accumulating at the bottom as heavy, inert deposit.
The drawn heads in pencil maintain a ghostly, provisional quality, quick notation, the speed of content production, the ephemeral nature of digital images. They’re barely there, suggestions rather than fully realized presences. The grey acrylic scumblings interrupting the pencil marks reinforces the sense of interference, static, the image struggling to cohere.
But the deposit at the bottom, that’s where the violence accumulates. It’s not just paint; it’s residue, waste, the material cost of all that image-making happening above. The wire threaded through it suggests reinforcement, structure trying to hold the sludge together, or perhaps circuitry, the technological infrastructure embedded in the waste stream. It could be rebar in concrete, or it could be fiber optic cables in digital infrastructure,either way, it marks this deposit as built matter, not natural sediment.
It’s as if the painting slid off the heads and pooled at the bottom. It visualizes gravity as extraction, the image/performance/labor happening in the upper register, and everything draining downward as waste, profit, extracted value pooling at the bottom where it can be collected, processed, commodified.
Here, the infrastructure is literally at the bottom, a thick band of grey matter with wiring running through it. The clean image-making (pencil, minimal paint) happens on top, but it’s all sitting on this foundation of accumulated waste, all the previous extractions compressed and hardened into substrate.
The scale relationship between the large head and tiny framed head continues the pattern from other YouTuber works, the performing self versus the monitored/reduced self, or the current version versus the next iteration waiting to replace it. But here they’re both equally insubstantial, both just pencil marks that could be erased, while the deposit persists, material and heavy.
This painting suggests that the real subject isn’t the YouTubers at all, they’re transient, replaceable, ephemeral. The real subject is the accumulated infrastructure of extraction: that thick band of grey matter and wire at the bottom, growing heavier with each cycle of performance and extraction, eventually becoming the foundation on which future performances must occur.
It’s also the most archaeological work in the series. It looks like a stratigraphic section, upper layer of recent marks, lower layer of compressed historical matter. The excavated remains of the structure of capitalism: image production on top (thin, quick, disposable), extraction infrastructure below (thick, slow, permanent).
The wire is key. It’s not decorative, it’s functional, suggesting this deposit isn’t inert but operational, still conducting signals, still part of an active system even as it accumulates as waste.