More Detail Than the Eye Can See: The Superrealist Architectural Art of Ben Johnson

When one thinks of superrealism — or photorealism as it’s also called — the images that come to mind are usually unsettling. Whether it’s Chuck Close’s monumental portraits or John Baeder’s eerily vacant scenes of Middle America, superrealist art works by mining the uncanny valley, the space that opens when a representation is so faithful to its source, it threatens to overtake it. No wonder, then, that superrealist painters more often than not reach for an everyday subject: a human face, a small-town picturesque or even a fried egg. Defamiliarization— the estrangement of the familiar — is the secret of their allure.

Ben Johnson is a different kind of superrealist. A British painter active since the 1960s, Johnson is every bit the technical maestro of Close, but he uses his powers to produce works that stun rather than unsettle. His interest has never been in representing the everyday, but rather in capturing the best design with a degree of detail that surpasses the perceptive abilities of either a camera or the naked eye. His depictions of architectural spaces, especially, have earned him a reputation for elevating extraordinary buildings to a realm of perfection only possible within the enclosed frame of a painting.

Room of the Niobids II (2011), acrylic on canvas, 71 by 99 inches (180 by 252 centimeters), depiction of the Neues Museum in Berlin

Over the last decade, Johnson has focused his energies on the Alhambra de Granada, the huge palatial complex in Andalusia, Spain, that served for centuries as the seat of the Islamic Nasrid dynasty. One of Spain’s most popular tourist attractions, a visit to the Alhambra is surely on the bucket list of anyone with even a passing interest in Islamic architecture. Magical as the spaces seem taken as a whole, they become all the more magical when viewed up close. The arabesque patterns that coat the walls and ceilings of the palaces are truly dizzying in their intricacy.

Facade of Sala de la Barca (2015), acrylic on canvas, 64 by 79 inches (163 by 201 centimeters)

Johnson’s achievement in the Alhambra series has been to do justice to both elements of the Alhambra’s majesty, the architectural and the decorative. While photographs can capture either the serene quality of the spaces or the magnificent detail of the wall decor, Johnson’s paintings succeed in capturing both.

Through the use of chiaroscuro, a technique of exaggerating contrasts between light and shadow, Johnson is able to make the patterns jump out at the viewer in a way that they never could otherwise, either in a photo or in person. While the paintings are no doubt “realistic” — it really seems like you can walk into them — they are more than that, too. It would not be too much to say that Johnson has realized the architects’ vision to a degree they never could.

Detail of the Facade of Sala de la Barca (2015)

Mirador de Lindaraja (2013), acrylic on canvas, 87 by 87 inches (220 by 220 centimeters)

As one can imagine, creating one of these canvases is a long process. Johnson typically spends nine to 12 months per painting. He works on them in stages, creating stencils from photographs, then transforming the stenciled areas to colored spaces.

Interestingly, he does not use brushes, preferring to spray the paint onto the canvas and then use sponges to apply shape and texture. Like the Old Masters, he has a team of people in his studio to help him with each stage of the process. “Each painting is a collaboration that is more important than me as an artist, or me as an individual,” he says. Each work “is a byproduct of collaboration.”

Johnson uses stencils to capture the intricate arabesque patterns of the Alhambra.

A work in progress — Roman Room, Neues Museum; via Matilda Bathurst

The superreal precision of Johnson’s work is reflected in his compositional choices. In most of his paintings, and especially those of the Alhambra, Johnson approaches his subjects from a head-on, totally symmetrical vantage point, often choosing to depict thresholds to better emphasize the geometrical scale of the nested spaces. Perspective after all — the technique artists use to create the illusion of depth — is a mathematical formula, a fact that Johnson does not wish to disguise.

Like the Dutch Renaissance painter Jan van Eyck, who included curved mirrors and other perspectival Easter eggs in his paintings to show off his mastery of illusionistic technique, Johnson is not afraid to draw attention to the artifice inherent in his artistic praxis. He is a realist, yes, but a modernist one. His interest in architectural rather than organic subjects seems to reflect an understanding that paintings, like buildings, are ultimately constructed environments.

Header image: a work in progress — Roman Room, Neues Museum; via Matilda Bathurst (all images courtesy of Ben Johnson)