ANDREAS JOHANSSON ’STUDIES OF AN IMAGINARY PLACE’

ANDREAS JOHANSSON ’STUDIES OF AN IMAGINARY PLACE’

In his paper-collages Andreas Johansson exposes his imaginary and nihilistic project and invites the spectator behind the constructed perspective of his landscape sceneries.
It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to our second solo show with the Swedish artists Andreas Johansson. At the exhibition ‘Studies of an imaginary place’ Andreas Johansson will be showing seven large paper collages, made out of photography’s he has taken of areas from his close environment.

At first glance Andreas Johansson’s 2-D paper-collages appears to be photography’s of deserted and demolished places, where al human civilization seems to have left the dilapidated concrete- and iron-constructions to the mercy of mother nature. Wild bushes and weed perforate the asphalt in front of the towering – almost roman-like – concrete columns. The graffiti-painters have long since decorated all vertical surfaces of the ruins and a (very) clear blue sky lies on top of an ever-seductive horizon. Although a closer inspection reveal that these landscapes – on one hand quite and on the other hand grand sceneries – are meant to be just as illusory, just as full of poetry and pent-up feelings, as the landscape paintings of the Romanticism. Andreas Johansson’s paper-collages are not only a deconstruction of the real existing places in his environment. They are also a re-construction of new imaginary places. A kind of ‘non-places’. Places that without a pre-existing history are left open to an almost nihilistic kind of perspective.

In Johansson’s sculptural paper-collages it becomes even more evident, that landscape sceneries are always (more or less) a construction of the artists mind and the spectators point of view. In his sculptural paper-collages his illusory way of playing with surfaces and depths becomes evident in the simplest way imaginable. The third dimension of the sculptural collages reveals that only from one angle, and one angle only, are things perceived in the right perspective. If the spectator takes one little step to the left or right, the illusion is broken and the reality of the distorted perspective becomes evident. In the sculptural collages Johansson exposes his imaginary and nihilistic project and invites the spectator behind the constructed perspective of his landscape sceneries.

Andreas Johansson (1977) live and work in Malmö, Sweden. He is a graduate from the Art school Idun Lovén and The Art Academy in Malmö (2006). He has previously been exhibiting at Kunstverine Hannover, I.A.S.P.I.S. in Stockholm and the Photo Festival in Arles, France. He is also represented at Malmö Art Museum and several other public institutions.

Bendixen