Herald St

In this his fourth solo exhibition at Herald St, Kiss Emitting Die Odes, Michael Dean’s works operate within the architecture of the gallery for want of the body of a book. Walls are pages, corners are binding spines that publish a lexicon landscape of kisses. Kisses that bruise and hickey untouched surfaces in search of something. Leaving behind an empathic capacitor of fragility and jouissance. Thirty-five works made up of extra virgin olive oil and lipstick kisses dusted with cement are combined in their purest form for Dean to pout his lips, to kiss and fix a language of abstracted, visceral typographies, that beg reception and return. Kisses pixel and punctuate into syntactic secreted autonomies, eventually resembling a “cement sculpture thin as ink”.

In their intimate forms, the lippy calligraphy deciphers a facet of the physical, performative act of ones kiss. Igniting a bodily response; you twist, lick your lips and tilt, as if to kiss and so assimilate the somewhat illegible kisses, that smack, smooch and snog across the framed paper page(s). By integrating a syntax of personal and political dichotomies, Dean performs, shall we say a romanticised calligraphy of odes. Odes that surrender to the simultaneous celebration and resignation of the departure of the kiss; the death of the kiss; the kiss of death. A personalised pen which pouts out a kissing continuum of amalgamations and iterations of murmurs and remembering(s) of love and love lost. A stream of unapologetic cries. Loss, lust, living death, hatred, anger, joy, the stars, sorrow, sadness seep from the vermillion bosom of lips that caress the paper. Paper which becomes a skin for these words [kisses] to linger on. Resounding in an everlasting, evolving, emotive love letter for fuck sake.