Next Thursday, March 15, will see the opening of the first solo exhibition of the South African photographer Johann Ryno de Wet at the camara oscura art gallery.

Ryno de Wet is a young 24 year-old artist selected by the prestigious Aperture Foundation within the frame of the project "Regeneration. 50 photographers of tomorrow". This project has been curated by responsibles of the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland in which they requested young photographers' portfolios to the most renowned schools of photography worldwide. Out of the presented works, a selection of the most talented artists was made, being one of them Ryno de Wet. Today, a traveling exhibition is being showed across USA, Switzerland, Italy, China, etc, along with a book of the same name.

Ryno de Wet is an artist whom Rubén Darío should name as "rare" and should also acknowledge an extraordinary talent. He is a creator of dystopic and cinematographic worlds in which the no man's land plays a leading role. Ryno de Wet colonizes each corner of his photographs with an overdose of mystery, panic and disturbance. The land of dreams continues to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration, and there are even more people who seem to travel through it when fully awake. There can be no other explanation for his audacious and chimeric photos. Ryno de Wet effectively uses digital techniques to convert a point of departure into one of arrival that is only in his head. The Freudian concept of "unheimlich" (uncanny) is his point of departure in a tangible reality that metamorphoses until it becomes unrecognisable, out of place and menacing.

Ryno de Wet invents post-apocalyptic landscapes, devoid of human presence, of bleak and uneasy appearance, which are nevertheless indescribably beautiful. Contrivance has seldom been more justified than in Ryno de Wet's work, as he opens doors for us to a truly personal fictional and imaginary world.