A green-painted bench stands by itself in an empty park. The bench is silhouetted against a background made up of a few trees or bushes, whose leaves are endowed with a rhythmical billowing movement in an otherwise static image. The scene exudes boredom but also seems charged with a secretive and ominous aura. Is it a crime scene, or just an ordinary bench? If it is a bench for lovers’ meetings, the couples have long since left and moved somewhere else, leaving just vacuum in their wake.
The lonely park bench brings to mind the surrealist painting Empire of Light by René Magritte. Like Magritte, Tillberg utilizes a no-frills, realistic visual idiom, but without the distortions of Magritte. Tillberg is interested in anonymous everyday life, the overlooked phenomena in our urban environment. The painting is a combination of memory and fantasy, inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up from 1966.
