BORIS TELLEGEN ABOUT HIS WORK

My work is in collage, sculpture, drawings, videos and installations. It investigates the tension between planning and happenstance; the semblance of order undone by schematic chaos. Mankind is driven by an unshakeable faith in progress, where modern technology and constant growth leads us to a better world. My work explores a different outcome, where the automated forces unleashed develop structures and minds of their own.

This fascination formed in the eighties, when the urban street became my canvas as I started writing graffiti under the alias of ‘Delta.’ As such I became revered worldwide among my peers for my three dimensional lettering. I grew from experiences to look at and deal with the streets to a more reflective kind of work. I always treated the two dimensional frame of the letter and the word as sculpture, bursting out or morphing into the wall, piercing its boundaries by adding a dimension.

The spray can medium has long since shifted towards objects on the wall, which now even literally annex the walls. If there is a recurrent theme in my body of work made over a thirty-year span, it is walls, and how to transcend their boundaries. It might breath the ghost of the old utopists and constructivists, but of a time where the rotting process of the concrete is clearly visible.

My collages read as isometric industrial landscapes. By layering, cutting and chiseling I search for change in scale and perspective. Pieces of paper get torn, glued and then torn again, and replicate beyond control, forming city scapes resembling fuming wastelands. In a recent project, called Exothermic, exhibited at ‘De Fabriek’ in Eindhoven, I made a wall that dissects their large hall. In the six-week act of construction lay I coded its inherent destruction. The wall was built from scratch, layer upon layer of geometric structures finally covered by generic drywall. Then the wall was hacked into, seemingly at random, exposing the raw energy of structure, logic and system hidden within, resembling a coal seam fire.