YouTuber VIII 2026 – 39 x 52cm, oil, acrylic, spray paint, charcoal on canvas
YouTuber VIII 2026 is an almost hallucinatory escalation in the YouTuber/Extraction series. One of the most aggressive and visually assaultive paintings so far, the moment where the extraction logic finally turns on itself with full, toxic force.
The central figure, a young person, is depicted close-up, eyes wide and unblinking, mouth open in what could be a shout, a gasp, or the beginning of a scream that never quite escapes. The skin is rendered in violent, oversaturated red, oranges, and greens, raw, arterial, almost flayed, then scored with vertical drips and scratches that expose the canvas weave beneath like wounds or digital glitches.
The green vertical streaks that rain across the face are corrosive, unnatural, like night-vision overlays or radiation burns; they don’t illuminate, they contaminate. The hair is a wild corona of black charcoal and spray paint, exploding outward and merging with the background storm, refusing any boundary between self and signal. The inset screen in the bottom right corner of the painting’s shows a smaller, ghostly head (intense, mid-speech) trapped inside a roughly framed rectangle, painted in cooler greys and whites, as if it’s the last remnant of a monochrome feed that refuses to die.
The contrast is merciless: the large figure burns in red-green fire, oversaturated to the point of rupture, while the inset persists in cold, spectral clarity, still talking, still performing, even as the source collapses. This is the loop inverted: the young man is the performer, burning out in real time, while the inset (the adult? the viewer? the algorithm?) keeps the broadcast alive, indifferent to the cost.
The spray paint adds a new layer of aggression: green drips and red bursts feel like graffiti on a surveillance wall, tags of resistance that are immediately co-opted by the same system they deface. 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. This is a painting depicting a live feed on the verge of meltdown.
In the Extraction/YouTuber arc, this is the moment of critical overload. The earlier heads were depleted; the YouTubers were consumed by their own visibility; the citizen grids showed collective exposure. Here, the young person becomes the ultimate victim of the attention economy: innocence turned into content, vulnerability turned into performance, the face oversaturated until it glows with its own destruction.
The red is not warmth; it is inflammation, exhaustion, burnout. The green is not hope; it is the afterimage of being seen too long, too harshly, too completely. The painting refuses any catharsis. The person speaks, the inset continues, the extraction rolls on. The colours don’t resolve; they clash, bleed, scar. The surface is a battleground where performance fights depletion, and both are losing.
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.