T293 is pleased to announce the new solo exhibition of Dan Rees (1982 Swansea, Uk) “Attachment”, a title which refers to the psychological condition of deep emotional longing, such as the 'damaged love' so potently described in the book Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
Rees' works assume a double value: on the one hand, they evoke what can be defined as the principle of turmoil consisting in the movement and dynamism described in his paintings and photographs; on the other hand, the calm and gentle harmony of colours, which emerge in soft subtle tones, like ghosts of the past, still present.
The core of the exhibition consists of a new production of Artex paintings, one of the artist's most recognised pictorial series. The name refers to a decorative technique that was common in the United Kingdom in the 1970's adorning the ceilings of many working class homes. Now the material is considered obsolete and behind the times, a common signifier of a particular social demographic which so called economic 'progress' precludes. Rees' paintings undermine this signifier by representing Artex as oil paintings, self-aware of their own staging as luxury items; they find a pathway back into homes of art collectors. Rees' paintings are shaped by their sparse use of colour, which we can perceive as the emergence of emotion within the work. Colour presents itself in these new paintings like shadows, full of past and present time, evocative of the changing destination from the domesticity within the ceilings of old houses to the reflective stage of gallery walls.
Accompanying these works is a large installation of photographs, Falling Sky, 2018 conceived as a transmigration of the locus of imagination from lying on the bed staring at the ceiling to lying of the grass staring at the sky. Both Falling Sky and the Artex paintings evoke the manner in which the human imagination is able to permeate its immediate boarders in its endless striving for meaning.
The new project by Dan Rees represents a pause of reflection and a subtle critique of the system in which the spiritual life of objects becomes drained. Rees presents a project that doesn't intend to lift the spiritual veil of objects but rather seeks a self-revelation in the very recognition of objects as veiled in the first place.

Opening: 17 December, 6pm

mpefm ITALY art press release