A curation by Natalie Slater, Curator at Singulart - ‘Read My Lips’ is a curation of hyperrealist painters and contemporary photographers using the red lip as a device—not an accessory. Across oil, analogue, and digital images, mouths become signal flares: glamour, armor, provocation, code. Faces are veiled by rain, bubble wrap, mesh; others stage the ritual itself—the twist of a tube, the snap of a gold case, the smear that refuses to stay polite. The tone swings from commercial gloss to intimate undoing. Society portraits sit next to drag self-studies; lacquered smiles face off with blurred, vulnerable skin. That friction is the point: surface vs. self, desire vs. display. These works don’t sell a product; they stress-test what the color asks of a face—attention, power, permission, risk. Red here is a verb. It marks, shields, dares. The image bites back.