The work on display at The Flat - Massimo Carasi embodies the artist’s more recent experimentation with colour and transparency as a common denominator. For example, Flip Shelf, a wall-hung, rectangular prism containing items such as storage paper boxes, metal cash boxes, binders, books and even folded towels, is presented in three colour versions in blue, orange and grey, the latter also made in a larger, standing version. Meanwhile, Déjà vu, a sumptuously black cube containing, among other things, briefcases and CD travel cases, is harmoniously juxtaposed with another, similarly sized but translucent cube made out of glass objects named Untitled, on the other side of the space.

Another approach Johansson has been employing in order to assemble his hybrid objects is the use of doubles and symmetry. When visiting jumble sales and second-hand shops to browse for materials, he’s always on the lookout for doubles of seemingly unique objects. Look closer at the artworks in the Flip Shelf series for example and you will spot that the lower and upper halves are inversely symmetrical. The same is true for the titular work of the exhibition, Alternative readings, a tall installation stretching from the gallery’s floor to the ceiling. Squeezed between two square, black coffee tables, the compacted cubic volume exhibits both horizontal and vertical lines of inverse symmetry, but fix your eyes on it and you will start to question the room’s spatial orthodoxy, what’s up and what’s down, left and right.

The exhibition is completed by a second site-specific installation, Corner Piece, composed of three wooden chairs wedged in a T formation between the gallery walls. As before, concepts of reflection and symmetry are tampered with to create a distorted version of reality where what we see is in conflict with what we know in what ultimately is a perfect encapsulation of Johansson’s ethos of making something unique from something otherwise ordinary.