Cheeto King

For this piece, I transformed the snack food Cheetos into an art medium to render a portrait of Donald Trump. The material choice is intentional—its saturated orange pigment mirrors the caricatured “orangeness” often associated with him, while the greasy residue transferred onto the paper seeps beyond the lines of the portrait. That oily translucence becomes metaphor: a fragile, porous surface standing in for his figurative skin.

The drawing is both humorous and critical. The absurdity of drawing a president with junk food underscores the cultural excesses that shape him—spectacle, indulgence, and gluttony. The material itself, mass-produced and disposable, speaks to the voracious ego the portrait critiques.

In blurring the boundary between food and fine art, this work calls attention to the ways image, consumption, and identity collapse into one another in contemporary politics. The Cheeto dust and grease not only mark the paper but also mark a culture complicit in consuming the spectacle.