Paper
Paper as a metaphor is often seen as an image of what is entirely empty of meaning. For example, being like a blank sheet of paper is a poor starting point for solving any problem. Or it is like the unrealized potential of the white sheet in the typewriter, which scares the writer into a writer’s block.
Today it is a favorite saying that we live in the paper-less society. But more than ever we use enormous amounts of paper: printing paper, toilet paper, money, books, wrapping paper and wrapping In general. But even though our daily lives are increasingly wrapped up in paper, we rarely see this as more than a neutral medium for information. We are generally blind to the material substance and the endless potential of paper. Like most essential values and things lying at the root of our lives, paper also becomes a banality whose inherent characteristics are forgotten. In this way paper is the material closest to being nothing in all its generality, distribution, whiteness and blank-ness.
Paper holds the rare combination of qualities and combinations that it is both fragile and multi-functional, nothing special as well as being just anything. What material would then be better suited to tell about formidable realities and crumpled-up failures? The limitations of paper present a challenge for Peter Callesen’s technical and craftsmanlike command of the material, and the banality of paper laves him free to develop the most dramatic tales.
The first work in A4 paper from Peter Callesen’s hand was a gimmick in an exhibition catalogue. In this catalogue he left one page with a complicated pattern, calling on the reader to fold his own fairy-tale castle from this sheet. The point was to offer the reader an impossible but tempting challenge, a challenge which Peter Callesen himself was not able to ignore, of course. What seemed to be impossible turned out to be possible, and this became the start of his long series of paper works challenging himself as well as the viewer in the shape of castles and numerous other motifs.
Peter Callesen has worked with a kind of dogma rules in a long series of his paper works in Size A4 (though not A4 only). Logic dictates that only this particular sheet is used, that nothing is added, and that after cutouts the silhouette reveals the building materials of the three-dimensional picture, but is also a motif in itself. Whereas the three-dimensional picture is the technically sensational one, the negative picture appears more laden as far as meaning goes, which makes the absent statement become the more present statement.
The paper cuts develop into adopting larger formats and larger portions of the room as well, some hanging on walls and continuing on to the floor with no frame, others spreading to cover an entire room with no frame and no distinct limitations. This maintains the interaction, which Peter Callesen has worked intensely with in his performances. The A4 works possess a performativity by virtue of the fact that they display their own process of creation, and that the large paper works serve as installations physically influencing the viewer by capturing his or her room. By way of being large installations the paper works dominate the rooms they are exhibited in, but because they are displayed with no frames and podiums the fact is dramatized that a mere touch can destroy the work.