'What’s surprising about Dan Rees’ plasticine abstractions – fields of thumbed material in cloudy pastel hues – is not their unconventional material but their unexpected beauty. Rees’ use of
the material makes self-evident allusion to childhood play, and draws comic parallels between the artist labouring away in the studio and the kid squidging plasticine between his fingers; and when engaging with the history of abstract painting, as Rees does, the satirical intent is clear. The clash of the high-minded and the infantile – they’re even untitled! – places Rees’ work in a tradition that goes back to Warhol’s ‘Oxidation’ paintings, sheets of canvas painted with copper pigment then urinated on, in punkish repudiation of abstraction’s claims to spirituality. Rees’ works share some of this spirit, but in their delicate colour relationships and dappled forms they come out, unexpectedly, like abstract Monets or Renoirs.'

-Ben Street