STUNNING SURREAL OPPOSITES: SIMEN JOHAN

Lush. Surreal. Uncanny. Beautiful. These are the words that instantly come to mind in an attempt to define the extraordinary photos of Simen Johan. Blending artificiality and naturalism, the award-winning fine art photographer’s compositions are brimming with paradoxical experience.

As he explains: “I strive to create tension and confuse the boundaries between opposing forces, such as beauty and brutality…or the familiar and the otherworldly, the natural and the artificial, the amusing and the eerie. I often feel like I am attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable as I explore the paradoxical nature of existence.”

Consider the opposite of an ecosystem -- where life and land normally not found together are juxtaposed. Johan explores this idea in his beautiful series, “Until Kingdom Comes.”

Merging traditional techniques with digital manipulation, Johan constructs complex photographic worlds that look like uncanny versions of our own. He inserts previously photographed plants and animals into landscapes stitched together from images of natural vistas—a constructed vision of nature, steeped in desires and delusions.

Some of Johan’s images actually are straight photographs, but most are constructed or manipulated. He likes to create more than he likes to merely document what he observes.

Johan first began by merging digital manipulation with traditional darkroom techniques. He then went on to develop a hybrid form of image - one that integrates candidly photographed animals and landscapes with a compositional structuring.

Johan combines image elements that he photographed in a wide range of international locations. Animals are stripped into settings that are quite opposite of their norm. Some are jarring, while others seem rather normal.

The opposing natural life forces in each image also convey a sense of fragility and urgency as natural environments are changing due to global warming and other human impacts.

The images are deeply emotional. While Johan is inspired by beauty in nature, beauty alone, doesn’t reflect his experience of the world, which is more complex and multilayered. His images also incorporate “darker qualities.”

The familiar becomes unfamiliar and the boundaries between what’s real and unreal, or what’s beautiful and what’s threatening, begin to blur. Incongruence puzzles and concerns. Patterns, colors and textures play differently than usual.

Simen originally studied film, before photography. That comes through in his images, which are are highly conceptual in theme, exposing the opposites in both their beauty and their threat. They feel painterly -- even cinematic.

Talking about his project, Johan writes, “When working on an image, I strive to create tension and confuse the boundaries between opposing forces, such as the familiar and the otherworldly, the natural and the artificial, the amusing and the eerie.”

“I often feel like I am attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable as I explore the paradoxical nature of existence, its simultaneous abundance of beauty and horror.”

See more works by Simen Johan at The Armory Show and Yossi Milo Gallery in New York.

Read more about Awesome Art all this week on BeautifulNow, including The Art of Time & Place and Moody Beauty. And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Wellness, Impact, Nature/Science, Food, Arts/Design, and Travel, Daily Fix posts.

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