Peter Callesen

Peter callesen:

My first impression of Peter Callesen’s work is that the use of paper and the blank negative creates a sense of emptiness like a void, which connotes the darkness of his work. I like how in one paper construction you have the balance between life and death, the empty space representing death in contrast to the modelled paper that signifies growth and a new life.

Background information:

Peter Callesen (born 1967) is a Danish artist and author. Callesen is renowned for his exceptional talent in combining the minimalism of a big crisp white sheet of paper with the complexity of meticulously cut and folded paper and uses the two to build out some really beautiful compositions. Particularly noteworthy are his works where the remains of the cut and folded objects are literally shadows of the objects former self. He uses the positive and negative space to tell a sometimes-dark story about the past and future of his subject using only a white sheet of paper.

He creates intricate paper cut artwork from A4 paper and in large-scale installations. Each work is created from one sheet of paper, be it three-dimensional flowers falling from a bouquet's negative, a hummingbird flying from the page, or a child-size castle crafted from a billboard-sized paper. He uses paper because he says it is "probably the most common and consumed media used for carrying information today," but we "rarely notice the actual materiality" of it. There is a tragic quality to most of his subjects, whether it's a flower dying, an angel locked in a birdcage, or even an apple reduced to its core. So the frail and delicate paper medium underlines that element of calamity.

He says: "The paper cut sculptures explore the probable and magical transformation of the flat sheet of paper into figures that expand into the space surrounding them. The negative and absent 2 dimensional space left by the cut, points out the contrast to the 3 dimensional reality it creates, even though the figures still stick to their origin without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is also an aspect of something tragic in many of the cuts".


My response:

In this response to peter Callesen I used his technique of removing paper to create a two dimensional pop out. I selected one of my primary sources and responded using Callesen’s style and kept it in the same form by maintaining its purity. Furthermore, I used one piece of paper which I delicately cut in to constructing an imitation of my photograph being careful to include all the elements and details.

The technique of removing and generating a negative is like creating two images, I find this effective as it combines two meanings it also gives a sense of balance between the purity of the white paper that is delicately cut against the thick bold cutaways.  I like the effect which some of Peter Callesen’s paper structures  create, for example how it continues to drop off the side of the table create a stream, I will include this technique within my installation as it will create a constant flow .