Maurice van Tellingen

Maurice van Tellingen dissects and reassembles “reality” in reconstructions, or rather concentrates, that look suspiciously like reality, but on closer inspection show the reverse.

What is true, what is valuable, what is real? Where are the boundaries of our social reality? Van Tellingen’s works show a world that is on the edge of our experience and that we can still understand as valuable or meaningful. And while, as a spectator, you think that you are looking at the stage from the front, you find yourself standing behind or in the wings. Miniature scenes devoid of humans, semi-3D scale models of reality: an absurdist point of view, with a basis in existentialism, Van Tellingen investigates the human condition using the objects of everyday life—caravans, garage doors, washing machines, French Windows—to question human identity, to try to find answers in the constructs that we make to endure our existence: the exoskeleton we create from clothing, artifacts and architecture, without which we would perish. Likewise, we would be lost without our social constructs, our stories and beliefs and conventions. From these, the questions arise of how we value objects and ideas and what is the language of objects.