Lockdown has brought with it many horrors, but one of its few fruits has been Tom Rees’s prodigious output from his temporary remote outpost in High Falls, away from his Brooklyn residence, swapping bodegas and skatespots for discarded snakeskins and gnarly woodland. Rees makes funny, unfussy and occasionally brazen work across a range of media: woodcut, paint, pen, film and, concertedly over this period, oil.

His existentialist scenes, portraits and still lives expose a murky underside to the real. A table reveals molten cracks beneath an otherwise innocuous vase. A sea-blue moon, fluorescent red sun, a disembodied eye and mouth – these details loom ominously over subjects wandering lost in desolate landscapes rendered in dour pallets. Elsewhere threat is more explicit: a drowning body, a Peeping Tom, a wry devil reiterated across several works, a pointless fist fight. Knowingly, Rees plays his characters puckishly as caricature. The result is a kind of psychosexual or moral fable, with the moralising part cauterised. Other works resemble disarticulated punchlines to crude jokes. And yet an implicit satire emerges across this – of the police state, white nationalism, toxic pornographic fantasy and consumer capitalism’s kitsch algorithms.

Like other magpie dwellers of NYC before him, David Wojnarowicz or Philip Guston, this is an artist who creates their own culture out of a boyish omnivorousness. Drawing from noir, art brut and elements of muralism, Rees’s alternative world distorts any boundary between the symbolic and the real. This is work that wants to provoke you, to make you laugh, but not to labour over intricacy. And yet, seeing such a handsome spread of work such as this, I am struck by the ambience, the suggestive absences, daring brushwork, the unheimlich gestures of its natural world, that lies beneath the more commanding images. This is work, indeed, a world, worth being kept inside for.

Sam Buchan-Watts
July 2020

Tom Rees is an artist working in various mediums born in 1988 in the South West of England and currently living in New York City. He obtained his BFA in 2010 from Goldsmiths, University of London where he met longtime collaborator the poet Raymond Kramp with whom he has worked with on publications including, Basic Needs, Death Sweats on The Sand, and currently Burden of Objects. Lately he’s been working primarily in oils and woodcuts pulling from iconic and esoteric language bringing us images that are familiar yet estranged.