Galleri Flach are proud to present Andreas Johansson’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, ”From Where the Sun Now Stands.”
The exhibition features a series of pop-up books with six pages, depicting a desolated and mythic environment. In the book appears a vacant lot from different perspectives, a place at the outskirt of society that is often visited by skateboard riders or people from the margins. In small fascinating miniature landscapes, we can study an environment where people spend time on their own terms or enter a free zone in an otherwise all too transparent and structured urban environment.
It is a drastic and fascinating meeting that occurs between the pop-up book’s innocent children’s book character, and the rugged environment’s connotations of youthful search for new and exciting context, as well as crime and drugs.
Andreas Johansson has long worked with collages where he cuts apart photographs and then builds up new environments, reminiscent of places we all recognize. As a young skateboard riders in Vaxjo, he was drawn to industrial and desolated places, which in his imagination could just as well have been an abandoned legendary skateboarding arena in the Arizona desert. That feeling of escape and daydreaming are captured in his collages. The artist portrays places, with a careful and skillful craftsmanship, that could be found just as much on the North American continent, as in a small Swedish town.
As the poetic title indicates, it is about exploring the surroundings from a more general position that symbolically points towards the sun. There is a particular sharpness in the images that highlights every detail, even if the source of the light remains unclear, and never identified.