Johan Eriksson by Lina Aastrup

Johan Eriksson’s artistic practice is fuelled by his hunger to see something new. His painting uses minute, detailed specks to hint at invisible lines, energies, and connections to both the spiritual and the physical worlds. The concrete is fused with the elusive in cascades of repetitions and curves that reach their climax in a lively yet peaceful dance of images.

LA — What drives you?

JE — What drives me, basically, is an instinctive need to produce the kinds of things I find stimulating and inspiring to the senses. I seek expressions that are timeless, and yet break with the visual impressions we’re all accustomed to from our daily lives. The kinds of things that mess with your ability to analyze and identify things, and which hint at an active reality beyond the one you know, and might thus inspire you to expand your mind and your self-understanding- I’m also inspired by the specific limitations that painting and my own specific method entail. Finding absolute freedom within these limitations, and allowing the practice to evolve organically, without losing its scent after a while, like a perfume.

LA — What’s your process like?

JE — My painting can be viewed as a dialogue between different opposites: the geometric and the organic; the minimal and the maximal; the simple and the complex; the spiritual and the pragmatic; and so on. I start out by priming the surface with several layers of thin, diluted oil paint, and then I place a dot somewhere on this surface with a steel-tipped pen, and proceed to extend it into a line. This accumulates through successive iterations, generating networks of clusters and coming up against various boundaries.

LA — What do your works represent, as you see it?

JE — They represent everything I’ve learned so far that I actually believe in. There are no specific visual references; rather, my accumulated experiences undergo a metamorphosis through my creative process, and the end results are my works. My hope is for these works to address the entire scale of experience: from the subatomic, through the microscopic, to the bodily, the earthly, and the cosmic. However, I think that the most important thing when viewing my works is that you don’t worry about them having some specific meaning that you’re failing to pick up on. Focus on your own experience, realize that this is the journey that has true value, and that it can be developed through careful, deliberate acts of viewing. We can all grow from learning to trust and cultivate our own instincts and intuition–and this growth is ultimately what I hope to contribute to.

LA — How does it feel to have graduated?

JE — It feels good. It’s quite an experience to be hurled out into the world after having enjoyed the privileged existence of art school life for five years. School is a sanctuary, and having to make your way in the “real” world is a huge contrast. It’s like learning to swim on land and then suddenly being thrown into the water. But I’m delighted to be finished, and I reckon I know how to swim.

Johan Eriksson (b. 1986) is based in Stockholm. Han earned his MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in 2021, and holds a BFA from Goldsmiths University, London, since 2018.