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Aaron Troyer’s paintings take on a storybook quality in their hard edges, dreamworld landscapes, and botanical patterns, traversing places that “feel both familiar and fantastical,” he says. By playing with perspective and flattening the picture plane, he brings motifs of flowers, fields, and streams to the foreground, exaggerating scale and inviting the viewer into a saturated, alternate reality.
Troyer takes a lighthearted approach to familiar landscape tropes, presenting “a living world that is free from the restrictions of objective scenery,” he says. “This gives the viewer free rein to explore each composition as a surreal landscape, abstract environment, or ideally, both simultaneously.”
Plants and trees are often portrayed as protagonists that merge the natural and unnatural—the real and surreal. Rather than relegating them to decorative backgrounds, the artist imbues the abstracted forms with what he calls “an emotional weight,” drawing on our faculty for empathy to “better understand the devastating toll that we often unknowingly inflict upon the natural world.”
All images © Aaron Troyer