Galleri Flach has the great pleasure to present Andreas Johansson’s installation Place Position.
The installation depicts a fascinating landscape of a deserted and abandoned environment in the seemingly empty gallery room. Andreas Johansson has long explored rugged environments and desolated landscapes at the border of urban and rural areas through illusory and three-dimensional representations. These are made in a very meticulous collage technique in which the artist cuts up photographs that are then joined together in new, familiar and yet fictional environments. The result is a puzzling experience of watching an authentic and yet illusory context, as if being somewhere very close and at the same time anywhere in the world. In these devastated areas there is a sense of youthful restlessness, as if searching for excitement at the border of what is permitted and forbidden.
Andreas Johansson has previously worked with similar sceneries in pop-up books, depicting a mythic place at the outskirt of society. In this installation he has used a larger format that takes the whole room into consideration. The environment is built up by an intricate interplay between forms of different sizes and placement in the room. The strategy refers back to classic tromp l’oeil effects that were used extensively in the architecture in Greek antiquity and also later in paintings during the Renaissance and the Baroque. In these complex paintings and compositions there is a vanishing point where all perspectives converge. This is also what happens in Andreas Johansson’s installation Place Position. At a given point a complete perspective emerges revealing a mythical environment, a place one would like to enter. But at the slightest movement to the side, the perspective falls apart and a different aspect is revealed.