(...) Mike Dans’s photos have a “cosy” feel, which enhances their novelty. This makes me think of something he told me, a few years back, about his drawings. “The bears I was drawing”, he said, “were monsters for me, connected with a menacing sexuality. But I noticed that some people hung them in their children’s bedrooms. That gave me the idea of photographing naked girls with cuddly toy animals.” In Mike Dans’s world, coloured scotch tape, plastic objects, fake fur and cuddly toys recur in disconcerting, touching and tender images, like non-biodegradable vestiges of a lost civilization.I see two things, above all, in them: the reality of the body and the reality of the dream. Here, the dream has become so real that the body can really show itself totally bare. I think this is what Mike Dans calls the “feminist” side of his photos. The body is accepted as it is. Everyone has the right to exist. All works of art relate to death or love. Death, which has only become conscious thanks to words and artworks; and love, with is nothing other than the acceptance of our mortality.(...)

Hans Theys, Montagne de Miel, 22 August 2016