YouTuber VII 2026 – 40 x 50cm, oil, acrylic, charcoal on canvas
YouTuber VII 2026 is a searing, feverish painting that takes the series’ core wound (the self consumed by its own visibility) and sets it on fire with colour, refusing to let it heal. The face dominates the 40 × 50 cm canvas, eyes drooping and bloodshot, mouth open in mid-shout or gasp, a red-orange aura bleeds into the surrounding space like flame or radiation.
The skin is rendered in molten, oversaturated hues, violent reds, bruised blues, and electric yellows, clashing and dripping like chemical burns or digital overexposure. Lines scratch through the wet paint, carving deep grooves that expose raw canvas beneath, turning the face into a scarred, flayed surface. The microphone is thrust forward like a weapon or a feeding tube.
This is the first time I’ve let colour dominate rather than intrude. The earlier heads were starved, necrotic, leached of life; the YouTubers introduced faint flares or leaks (red-ochre stains, green burns). Here, a phosphorus oversaturation has been unleashed in full: the face is irradiated, glowing with an unnatural, toxic intensity that feels both alive and terminal. The red-orange hair and skin read as a final flare-up before collapse, the body burning through its last reserves of visibility, the performance reaching critical mass. The blue intrusions around the neck and shoulder are cold counterpoints, like cooling circuits or the afterimage of screen glare, reminding us that this heat is artificial, engineered, unsustainable.
The scratching-back is merciless: long vertical drags pull colour downward in streaks like tears or blood, revealing grey underlayers that feel like ash or the ghost of monochrome depletion. The residue pools at the bottom, clots of red, blue, black, like waste from the very act of amplification. The background is a dense, swirling field of charcoal and thin acrylic washes: feedback loops, comment streams, algorithmic noise, all bleeding into the figure until there is no separation between self and signal.
In the Extraction/YouTuber arc, this painting is the moment of overload. The face is not disappearing quietly, it is burning out, oversaturated to the point of rupture, the colours popping against the scraped grey like warning flares in a blackout. It captures the attention economy’s deepest psychological trap: the demand for hyper-presence, for constant glow, until the self is consumed by its own light. The small scale keeps it intimate, almost confessional, yet the intensity makes it feel monumental. This is an image of a live feed on the verge of meltdown.
I am attempting to make contemporary portraits that directly refer to our digital political culture, the way we access content, how it is framed, how it is distributed, and how the attention economy plays into that.