Peter Callesen

Peter Callesen, Impenetrable Castle, Acid free A4 115 gsm paper and glue, 2005

It is telling that the work of Peter Callesen (www.petercallesen.com) came to my attention via both my mom and urban designer/ architecture curator James Kirkpatrick (www.99asterisk.org/celeb/about). Callesen's paper cut-out sculptures and performances are appealing to appreciators of imaginative narrative and to the structurally minded alike. Like many artists who work with paper, Callesan's works hover between two and three dimensionality, the real and imagined- flights of fantasy firmly bounded by the limits of reality. Some of his most evocative projects emerge from the ubiquitous european paper format, the blank white 80gsm A4 sheet.

Peter Callesen, Looking back, Acid free A4 115 gsm paper and glue, 2006

"I find the materialization of a flat piece of paper into a 3D form as an almost magic process", says Callesen of his own work, "or maybe one could call it obvious magic, because the process is obvious and the figures still stick to their origin, without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is also an aspect of something tragic in most of the cuts".

Peter Callesan was born in Denmark and studied at Goldsmith's college in London. His upcoming exhibition "ALIVE, BUT DEAD" at Helene Nyborg Contemporary, Copenhagen, opens April 17th, 2008.