The world depicted by Maurice van Tellingen seems to be in order, but something is not quite right. The works show situations that exist everywhere and nowhere, where nothing happens and where time revolves slowly. In the corner of the room, somewhere in the back of the garden or on the corner of the street. Places that are considered unimportant in everyday life. But dissected, turned inside out and reassembled into a work of art, they acquire a special and poetic presence that no longer seems to reconcile with their apparent meaninglessness.

In this representation of the man-made environment, he focuses our field of view. All this takes shape in reliefs, image-enhancing representations, literally and figuratively. There is depth, but more than the object actually measures. Seventeenth-century artists already seduced us with a phenomenon called ‘trompe-l’oeil’: an optical delusion.

The origin of the work lies in the artist’s personal history. He has seen them from early childhood: the paving stones, the white caravan, the grit of bricks and cement. In the works of art he makes his innumerable, careless observations absolute and universal.