Class Consciousness

For his sixth exhibition at T293: "Class Consciousness", Dan Rees presents two projects both of which reflect their context as aesthetic objects in different ways. The "Artex" paintings are made with oil paint and are overloaded with colour and contain a dramatic intensity frequently associated with abstract expressionism. Their process of production reflects a very specific history of painting and the concept of connoisseurship, which accompanies the ‘privileged medium’. On the other hand, the wall ‘impressions’ are made with acrylic paint, a more synthetic material than oil paint, quick to dry and easily cleaned. The works themselves are planned and made directly on the gallery wall in a manner which foregrounds the ‘act’ or spontaneous gesture over craft or skill. Due to the repetition of their display the impressions are more evocative of the seriality and play of Conceptual art than the rarefied handcrafted object of ‘serious’ painting. Each work is somewhat mechanically produced yet the result is both unique and site-specific.

The interior design material Artex, (trademark Artex Ltd), which Rees’ paintings mimic in oil paint, is heavily burdened with negative social signifiers. Artex ceilings were extremely common in the UK in the 1960s and 70s but become déclassé in the aspirational 1980s. For Rees it is the aesthetic, class related rejection of Artex as a decorative material combined with painting's complex history of market complicity, which inhibit these paintings’ status as high culture objects. It is however the imagined class and taste related rejection of these ‘decorative paintings of interior decorations’, which secures a backdoor criticism of social and artistic hierarchies. It is for this reason that the Artex paintings fulfil their conceptual capacity when they are hung in collector's homes, the distinctive patterns find their way once again into homes, albeit of a very different socio-economic strata.

Class and class relations, is the often-overlooked social mediator in today’s cultural debates, yet class-consciousness has historically been the central structure from which to decipher the abstractions of economic relations. Today’s ‘class-unconsciousness’ is more obliquely referenced through Rees’ ‘impression’ works which function like a serialised set of Rorschach tests. Popular in the 1960s, these simple psychological tests of object perception are made through free association in which ambiguous stimuli is understood to reveal unconscious attitudes. Art and economic relations both benefit from the ‘necessary illusion’ of their autonomy. Rees’ impressions are made directly on the gallery walls such that the materiality of the paint and its ability to create the illusion of spontaneous meaning is foregrounded.