Dali House

MC Escher, that tyrant of dimensionality, once declared himself “irritated” by flatness. Flat shapes deserve only merciless discipline, he said. “I make them come out of the plane.”

Cracking the whip with gentle elegance is Peter Callesen, a 40-year-old Dane whose website Papercuts soars with pale birdwings like the ones shown here. Give the man a sheet of A4 paper, a bit of glue, some time and a very, very sharp knife and he’ll make you a tiny, perfect masterpiece. Or a large one if you share his fascination with castles.

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The website also documents his exhibitions in Denmark, Germany and Britain involving installations and performances that are, to me at least, as dreary as anyone else’s, although there was one cute idea where people sat in a reclining chair and announced their wishes aloud. Callesen, stationed far above them in a church tower, overheard via a baby’s crib monitor and hastily threw together a response in the form of something he could safely fling down to them.

Critics cited on the website find far more of interest in his other work that I’m able to, but the paper cut-outs are something else again. One “art historian” manages to at least come up with a sentence about these that wasn’t overtly silly: “Perceived more symbolically, the connectedness of figure and ground seems to propose the inevitability of origin, meaning the impossibility of ever freeing oneself from the past.”

Speaking for himself, Callesen admits to a fondness for reinterpreting the classical fairytales and other joys of childhood.

Shown here, top to bottom, are “Half Way Through”, “Holding on to Myself”, “Alive, But Dead”, “Birds Trying to Escape Their Drawing” and “Eismeer”, all from the last two years. Big thanks to dedicated Web wanderer Chris Frumplington for pointing out Callesen’s site to me.