Michael Dean’s F-Bombs and Eight Balls

Michael Dean confronts foregone conclusions with his exhibition at Mendes Wood DM’s new Paris address. The ensemble of works (all 2023) comprises sculpted spinal columns, figures of eight and painted wall-mounted pieces made up of black-daubed burlap, wire fencing and reinforced concrete. Together, they invoke a sense of growing foreboding, as though some final gambit has been played here and lost.

The artist revisits and reinterprets tropes familiar from his wider corpus, again playing with collapsed dialectical binaries in which one signification clashes directly with its opposite without clear synthesis. Installed on the entrance staircase, the concrete and rebar curved spines and muddy feet of Unfuckingtitled (eyes and smiles) appear as a family of three ascending the stairs, they also form a series of melting crying-laughing emojis – an ambiguous welcome that wavers in tone between screaming glee and utter dread.

Upstairs, the galleries are populated by Unfuckingtitled (8) and Unfuckingtitled (8ball fingers crossed): four figurative sculptures whose forms have been extrapolated from sketched glyphs of a demotic visual language. Since each piece is positioned as to closely observe the surrounding wall works, there is something voyeuristic – obscene almost – in peering at the wall-mounted objects over the shoulders of these bent and cowed figures. Given Dean’s repeated reference throughout the show to the eight ball – both as a visual motif and in the titles of works – this installation dynamic suggests the artist believes we are snookered in our present moment, with no clear way forward and nowhere to go but probable failure. In wording Dean might prefer: that we, collectively, are fucked.

Also repeated here is the image of the staircase, with the painted works representing a series of eight balls broken by perspective into swirling sets of stairs or their rhyming-slang equivalent, apples and pears. Combining elements that speak to the long-shuttered coal-mining heritage of the artist’s native Newcastle upon Tyne – the sack cloth and black pigment of the show’s title, ‘Lamp black on sack cloth (love for fucksake)’ – these images hint towards the fallacy of social mobility and the dehumanizing treatment of British working-class communities trapped in a cycle of perpetual decline. Continuing this theme, the works here are largely formed of the materials of recent failed projects of urban renewal: wire fencing ringing empty city-centre plots; stacked rebar turned scarlet by elemental exposure; cement left to harden into warped and distorted forms in the bag. These materials speak of open tears in the social fabric of the artist’s home city, and the systemic lack of human empathy that has brought us to a precipice on a much larger scale, living as we do in the 21st century among the ruins of our own futurity.

Dean’s practice revolves around the multiplicity of variations generated by repeatedly doodling a cursive ‘f’. This voiceless, labiodental fricative is included in the form and title of the works presented here, and in the title of the show. It is the beginning of the phrase that has become both the artist’s mantra, and his internet alias, ffffucksake. The symbol mutates into a pound sign, into the eight of a pool ball, the lemniscate curves of an infinity symbol, the contortions of the ouroboros snake eating its own tail, the voided 0–0 of a zero-sum game. Between frustration, faltering social economy, forlorn hope, forever repetition and a result arriving nowhere at all, ‘Lamp black on sack cloth (love for fucksake)’ pushes Dean’s aesthetic beyond localized engagements with social entropy, and thrusts the viewer into the abyssal on a much more fundamental, and fundamentally human, scale. 

Michael Dean’s ‘Lamp black on sack cloth (love for fucksake)’ is on view at Mendes Wood DM, Paris until 20 January

_{Main image: Michael Dean, Unfuckingtitled (!)(FULL EMPTY), 2023, reinforced concrete and oil paint on sack cloth, 65 × 180 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York}