The dream manufacturing unit
A subject strewn with stars, a supply of full moons, a swarm of fish… A virtuoso of distortion and collusion of photographs, enjoying with photographic illusionism with the irreverent audacity of poets and the deceptive ingenuity of magicians, Erik Johansson has been dreaming, imagining, setting up, and photographing since 2007, parallel worlds born of unbelievable superpositions.
& “Twisting actuality without ever dropping the impression of realism”: such is the neo-surrealist line of the young Swedish photographer; a surrealism closer to fantasy than science fiction. In the age of computer-generated pictures, this great image magican uses bricolages and collages to create real-false sets with truncated, inverted or demultiplied views. Dealing with the observer with visible enigmas, these dreamlike settings, mixing humor and fantasy, ecological disasters and cosmic reveries, are harking back to the truculent tips of Méliès within the early days of cinema. &
Video games of scale and perspective, mise en abîme (landscape in panorama), inversions (inside/outdoors, prime/bottom, sky/earth), duplications, contaminations, and weird inclusions… in his upside-down pictures, Johansson performs with the disruption of physical legal guidelines and the transgression of logic to the point of absurdity to push back the frontiers of reality.&
“Surrealism has by no means been for me a brand new sort of magic. The imagination, the dream, all this intense liberation of the unconscious, which goals to make appear on the floor of the soul what it has the habit of preserving hidden, should necessarily introduce deep transformations in the scale of the appearances […] The concrete all modifications of vêture, of bark […] The beyond, the invisible pushes back the truth. The world doesn't hold any extra,” wroteAntonin Artaud in 1927, in A la grande nuit ou le bluff surréaliste.
In Erik Johansson’s landscapes, recomposed in situ or in the studio (before being photographed, edited, and retouched), the world not holds collectively or hangs by a thread, our bodies stagger, the earth crumbles… Many roads haven't any exit, however the ladders lead to the sky, and the doors open onto the area of goals…
A lady/fairy plucks the celebs with (big) tweezers, a lake breaks like a mirror, a street tears and folds like a leaf, a landscape slides into the void, another floats in a bottle whereas a mountain spreads out in giant snowy draperies in a bedroom metamorphosing right into a ski resort… From trompe-l’oeil to camouflage, from distorted perspective to countless reflections, this photographer, who needs to “seize the unattainable,” re-enchants the world.
Exhibition Erik Johansson: Concepts come at night time
Till April 24th&
The Swedish Institute – 11, rue Payenne, Paris III – www.institutsuedois.fr
Stéphanie Dulout
L’article <em>ERIK JOHANSSON</em> est apparu en premier sur Galerie Joseph.
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