Dexter Wynn · No. 92

The Comic Kiss

The Comic Kiss compresses an entire romance into a single, blown-up panel. Dexter Wynn crops in tight on the embrace, flattening the lovers into bold primary colour and ringing them in the heavy black outline of the comic strip, while Ben-Day dots — the mechanical halftone of cheap newsprint — hum across skin and background, magnified here to monumental scale. The debt to the founding gesture of mid-century Pop, the appropriation of pulp-romance imagery, is explicit and unashamed; yet Wynn strips away every caption and speech bubble, removing the narrative crutch and leaving only the gesture itself, the universal and slightly melodramatic clinch. In doing so he performs the genre's central alchemy: the mass-produced and deliberately artificial is enlarged and isolated until it acquires the weight of high feeling. The flat colour keeps the image legible from across the room; the dot screen keeps it honest about its commercial origins. The result is at once knowing and genuinely tender — irony and sincerity held within the same frame, which is precisely where Pop is most alive. A confident, graphic statement, it turns the disposable language of the comic book into an enduring icon of desire.

An original oil painting on canvas by Dexter Wynn, painted to order — never a reproduction. Pop-art icons in flat primary colour, Ben-Day dots and bold black outlines — everyday objects and bright portraits with a comic-book punch.

Artist

Dexter Wynn

Medium

Oil on canvas

Finish

Unframed, ready to hang or frame

Made

To order, by hand