Both in his early performances and in the present current paper works Peter Callesen has worked with tragi-comical figures plunging into reckless projects that fail in spite of a persistent effort. If ‘sympathetic’ had not been a far too peevish word for the fundamental human longings and dreams which the projects aim at fulfilling, all the projects might be said to be sympathetic in spite of their reckless objective. As for the previous performances, the rule typically applies that after hubris follows nemesis. Not in the sense that a moral sentence is passed on the tragi-comical figures learning their lesson the hard way. On the other hand the luckless heroes, hoping to be able to achieve the impossible, come up against the hard obstacle of realities, in the shape of gravity being insurmountable, the power of water over paper or the incompatibility of reality and picture.
In subsequent works the tragic hero’s heart-rending failure seems to be increasingly replaced by the artist working with the beauty and poetry of insisting on reaching the impossible.
Through the oeuvre runs a romantic vein, and many of the existential questions raised in the works are repeated although the perspective is warped. Many of the previous works carry literary references to e. g. fairy tales, treating themes like the lost land of childhood, the frailty of the notion of masculinity while producing fresh suggestions for modern memento mori pictures which have served throughout the history of art to remind us of the transitoriness of life. Subsequent works address the artist’s role from a more psychological and complex perspective, and the existential questions that are raised have a more metaphysical angle, the latest works involving a specifically Christian set of motifs.
“I am very much inspired by the painters of Romanticism. For example, I have created several works referring directly to paintings by Casper David Friedrich. Like him I work with symbols in art, often ascribing meanings to Nature that transcend the merely biological. My way of attempting the impossible can be said to be a romantic tendency, too.
Furthermore, I think that in my art there can sometimes be said to be indications of our being part of a greater context – a context that is greater than ourselves, but which we may merely sense or even not understand at all.”
Romanticism is not a style, but a mode of perception. A melancholy and wistful mood, which leaves its mark on the way we look at the world and the self. On the terms of contemporary art something as ordinary as sheets of A4 paper becomes the bearer of a romantic tension between frailty and grandeur.