Danish artist Peter Callesen, after early forays into installation art with traditional materials, began investigating the simple, sophisticated beauty of basic materials: water, ice, snow.

His growing success, however, has come from his work with perhaps the most ubiquitous and underappreciated art material --- the everyday business paper sheet. The European A4 size (equivalent culturally and socially to North America's 8-1/2x11" sheet) has never behaved so poetically as under the eye, hands and blade of Callesen in his large and small installations. Though he sometimes uses large sheets, I find his most haunting and poetic work to be the framed and installed work made out of A4.

With a postmodern, almost Pop-Surrealist sensibility, Callesen partcipates in the growing culture of micro-sculpture and mini-installation. His work has a narrative power and raw visual design impact cutting and folding the paper into surprising metamorphoses.

One of my favorite Callesen pieces is the subtle, haunting and gorgeous Erected Ruin, which shows both the current dilapidated state of a vanished church and the shadow --- in the negative cut space --- it once cast in its heydey.