Capturing the heritage of surrealism, Erik Johansson opens up, in the broadest sense of the word, the realm of the real. The miter of imagination thrusts upward from the black robes of the earthly matrix. This is a way of awakening a dying, stifled world, not in order to make it more beautiful, but rather to translate its chaos. The majesty of the cathedral of nature recedes before its chinks and cracks.
Like a mole or a surgeon, Johansson burrows under the skin of the world. The importance of narration becomes fundamental. However, his surrealism is not necessarily good-natured: the nightmare is closer to the surface than the dream.
The artist translates postmodern anguish and offers eye-opening visions. His revelations are anything but attractive fakes. Instead, a counter-epic takes shape, never far from the romanticism of the ruins which is much more à-propos than the second-rate fantasy of science fiction. Hypothetical regression gives way to signs of grandeur and decadence in today’s worlds.
Space becomes de-spatialized, disconnected, undone. The artist sets minds ablaze by raising up the world and exposing it to both an impossible risk and a sublime dimension of possible ecstasy. Proximity and distance issue forth. We are left with the impression less of a physical contortion of the world than its aftertaste.
Cut open, the real draws the gaze: it becomes defenseless—perhaps so that everything may begin just where it is about to end. And so that everything is yet to be “written.”
The world becomes the remnant of a disappearing tribe. And it exists more in time than in space in order to attain the “pure time” invoked by Proust. Perhaps it’s a time without consciousness, a time of primordial beings.
The work becomes a mysterious philter that unites and separates organized receptivity and social hospitality. In a word, it disturbs the order; it is the false note that disrupts the ancient chorus of the image. It also sheds all inhibitions and offers a ghostly universe: the world ends up burning its wings like an obstinate moth.
EXHIBITION
Erik Johansson : Select Works
From February 26th to April 10th, 2016
Museum of Photography (Fotografiska)
Stadsgårdshamnen 22
116 45 Stockholm
Sweden
