One Sheet of Paper

Danish artist Peter Callesen creates a white, hyper-aesthetic universe of puns-in-paper, often making use of a tragic-comic slap-stick humour with a melancholic tinge. His paper cutouts are intricate, revealing a painstaking craftsmanship. With great care and immense patience. Instead of drawing, Callesen cuts, folds and suddenly a world appears. 2D becomes 3D, which is quite a heroic gesture in and by itself. A gesture of basic transformation you might call it, initiated by the artist/creator.

Callesen’s sculptures are neither heavy, nor monumental. Rather, through their delicate materiality, their flagrant fragility evokes an ‘aesthetic of possible failure’, as if they are always on the verge of collapsing, of falling apart or being flattened by an awkward hand. In this way Callesen reformulates sculptural practice, querying as well as queering in a way, the monumentality of the medium.

Holding on to Myself, 2006 47,5 x 37 x 7 cm
Acid free A4 80 gms paper, glue, acrylic paint, and oak frame