A selection from our personal bookshelf: Boris Tellegen – Current | 2015
Published by Backslash Gallery
32 pages
17 × 24 cm
English
Backslash is proud to announce Current, the second solo show by Dutch artist Boris Tellegen. The exhibition presents a new set of series that look afresh at his earlier works through the prism of a carefully heightened polychromy.
Current as a term covers many meanings, encompassing the notions of an electrical current, a current in the sea and the current that is a movement, as well as clearly referring to the idea of a current body of work. It is also a word that conjures up a sense of movement and unbroken activity, of ceaseless development.
Current is the logical next step that follows on from Tellegen’s first show at Backslash, a deliberate exercise in monochrome. The exhibition presents a new collection of works that juxtapose mastery of colour with the strong presence of white. This is a dialogue of nuances, each drawing out the other. Tellegen describes the series in the show as being a synthesis of the various artistic periods of his career to date.
Large assemblies of painted wood sit alongside small glued works in paper whose delicacy emphasises the artist’s architectural sensitivities. Boris Tellegen’s working methods embrace a wonderful talent for painstakingly assembling elements that he fine-tunes beforehand by computer. In describing himself as an ‘architect of chaos’, he is expressing the idea of rigour and control of what is a faux chaos within a precisely ordered sequence, the product of his engineering training. There is no place here for the random. Starting from the radical deconstruction of letters and type that made his name during the 1980s, when he was known as Delta, Boris Tellegen has developed a universe of constructions wherein the interstice between the real and the conceptual combines with a geometrical style founded on inverted perspectives. The artist explains: “My collages read as isometric industrial landscapes. By layering, cutting and chiseling I search for change in scale and perspective.” (from editor)
