The dream factory
A field strewn with stars, a delivery of full moons, a swarm of fish... A virtuoso of image distortion and collusion, playing with photographic illusionism with the irreverent audacity of poets and the deceptive ingenuity of magicians, Erik Johansson has been dreaming, imagining, constructing and photographing parallel worlds born of improbable superimpositions since 2007.
"Twisting reality without ever losing the impression of realism" is the neo-surrealist line of the young Swedish photographer: a surrealism closer to the fantastic than to science fiction. In the age of computer-generated images, this great image prestidigitator uses bricolages and collages to create real-fake sets with truncated, inverted or multiplied perspectives... Confronting the viewer with veritable visual enigmas, these dreamlike stagings combining humor and fantasy, ecological disasters and cosmic reveries are reminiscent of the truculent tricks of Méliès in the early days of cinema.
Plays on scale and perspective, mise en abîme (landscape within landscape), inversions (inside/outside, up/down, sky/earth), duplications, contaminations or unusual inclusions... In his upside-down images, Johansson plays with the disruption of physical laws and the transgression of logic to the point of absurdity to push back the boundaries of reality.
"For me, surrealism has never been anything but a new kind of magic. Imagination, dreaming, all this intense liberation of the unconscious whose aim is to bring to the surface of the soul what it is accustomed to keeping hidden, must necessarily introduce profound transformations in the scale of appearances [...]. The entire concrete changes its clothing, its bark [...]. The beyond, the invisible, push reality back. The world no longer holds together", wrote Antonin Artaud in À la grande nuit ou le bluff surréaliste in 1927.
In Erik Johansson's recomposed in situ landscapes or studio sets (before being photographed, edited and retouched), the world no longer holds together or hangs by a thread, bodies stagger, the earth crumbles... Many roads are dead ends, but ladders lead to heaven and doors open onto the realm of dreams...
A woman/fairy plucks out the stars with (giant) tweezers, a lake shatters like a mirror, a road tears and folds like a leaf, a landscape slides into the void, another floats in a bottle, while a mountain spreads out in great snowy drapes in a bedroom metamorphosing into a ski resort... From trompe-l'œil to camouflage, from distorted perspective to endless reflections, this photographer who wants to "capture the impossible" re-enchants the world.
"Erik Johansson: Ideas come at night" - Swedish Institute
11, rue Payenne, Paris 3e
Until April 24, 2022
Artist'swebsite:
http://erikjohanssonphoto.com/
Instagram account: @erik.joh
Youtube channel :
http://youtu.be/DHVroXo_K50 http://youtu.be/TiCLMePjK-Y
Making of works exhibited :
Full Moon Service 3:08 min - https://youtu.be/6gHmKBym2pc
Daybreaker 2:59 min - https://youtu.be/ryZVuX816fM
Office Escape 1:32 min - https://youtu.be/5u_n3tjPznc
Or others: https://www.erikjo.com/behindthescenes
Stéphanie Dulout