Anders Johnson | Afterimages
This series of paintings represents the direction my work has been heading over the past four years. I create the paintings through a process that involves cutting and recomposing photography from my travels into “digital sketches” using Photoshop. The images come primarily from a series of recent experiences I’ve had in Greece, Turkey, and Spain. After photographing and sketching artwork, anthropological objects, and architectural spaces from my travels, the resulting composite sketches are used as studies for the final paintings. While abroad, I am interested in documenting evidence of what I perceive as the intersection of older civilizations with modern excesses in capitalism; artifacts from the Spanish Inquisition or the Fall of the Ottoman Empire mixed with Peloton treadmills or 24-hour news networks.
This effect of using both photographic and digital processes to compose the work results in imagery that looks simultaneously real and surreal. Pictorial spaces will unify and imply perceivable depth through color and consistent lighting, but will never logically synchronize to suggest a believable scene. A flattened collaged area consisting of ripped and torn imagery may abruptly appear next to a dimensional passageway receding into the distance. And along with blurring the perception of form and space, the compositions are disconcertingly void of humans, though so much of the evidence of their influence still remains. This intersection of old and new, real and simulated, present and absent at the same time reads as both apocalyptic and playful.
“Afterimages” refers to painted worlds where there is no observable hierarchy of value – Hellenistic Sarcophagus lids sit adjacent to Yeti coolers and pontoon boats are covered with intricate mosaic tesserae. In response to his Ready-mades, Marcel Duchamp once suggested that a Rembrandt painting could be used as an ironing board. In the wake of the global pandemic, this series of paintings now suggest an “After times” where surrealism becomes the new normal.
Video of Artist Talk
Wednesday, November 11th 2 PM EST
Artist Info
Anders Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Art at Western Colorado University and teaches Foundation Drawing and Design. Johnson earned his BA from North Park University in Chicago, IL and he holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Indiana University. Prior to Western, Johnson taught at Indiana University (both on campus and through their study abroad program in Florence, Italy) and at Vincennes University.
Johnson has an active national and international exhibition record of solo and group shows and his artwork is in several collections including the Evansville Art Museum and The CICA Museum in Seoul, South Korea. He was also featured recently in New American Paintings and was a guest on the Studio Break Podcast. As a painter, Johnson creates environments that are filled with ruin and disarray, but that also contain a mindful assemblage of cultural, historical, political, and personal references.
https://www.andersjohnson.net/