Peter Callesen has been creating magnificent three-dimensional paper cuts using the ubiquitous white printer paper that holds much of our information today. With unbelievable dexterity, the artist has made antique ruins collapse from a pristine sheet of A4 paper and erected to-scale doorways and staircases within gallery walls. More after the jump.

While many traditional paper cuts rely on the painstaking detail of technique to dazzle viewers, Callesen’s work is more complex, creating sculptural puns that play with the artist’s particular materiality. Freestanding parts emerge from sweeping flat silhouettes, and complex architectural structures are assembled from cut out, flat components. Each work requires a leap of imagination from the viewer to connect the parts to the whole, as exotic, historical, and fantastical architecture leaps out from the paper and suddenly encroaches into our space.

The paper itself becomes simultaneously fragile and robust as it undergoes transformation from a universal blank slate into a whimsical free-standing image. In his manipulation of two-dimensional paper into three-dimensional form, the artist molds our very perception of white paper, making us reconsider a material that most of us encounter everyday.

[All images courtesy the artist]

by Kelly Chan

posted in Uncategorized

tagged Architecture, Art, cut out, denmark, palace, paper, Peter Callesen, sculpture

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