There must be an extreme sense of order in Michael Johansson‘s mind, so high that he manages to elevate it from pure balance to artistic installation. The harmony and compactness of the Swedish artist’s works are a way of feeling the same sense of peace and satisfaction we feel when we manage to insert the USB stick on the first try or when we manage to put everything in the suitcase before a trip without breaking the zip.
Johansson’s works are mainly divided into two forms of experimentation, the first production concerns compact cubes of various objects without necessarily a connection between them, while the second is represented by metal grids that connect real starter packs to be assembled together. Working with real objects, the artist leaves open an interpretation that focuses on the single instrument, and therefore on the single gesture, as well as on the meaning that these objects can take on only if they are put in relation to each other.
The metal structures, used as installations both indoors and outdoors (but also floating on the water), resemble those sets found in toy boxes, famous for toy soldiers, in which the pieces arranged in a grid must be physically cut to be combined. The artist creates these works with perfectly matched monochrome tubes.
The production of cubes varies in size, ranging from works of twenty-five centimetres per side to five-metre installations in which Michael Johansson inserts containers and life-size machines. Once again, the chromatic component is one of the cubes’ most characteristic features, the balance of colours reflecting the way each object seems to be fitted into the only place it could have been.
The works of this Berlin-based artist, who also experiments with other installation formats in which everything is perfectly in order, are like perfectly executed puzzles.
