Flying on the Wings of Dreams

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite and you do not know what it will bring back...” once said Anaïs Nin, the French-born novelist and short story writer most widely known for her Journals. Now think of the enthusiastic kite flying competitions in which kids excel to present the most beautiful gears and to show their skills and expertise at handling them.

Nothing would be more adequate to help us describe Peter Gentenaar’s art, for his paper sculptures truly look like huge oneiric kites floating in the air to the wonder of all those who are privileged enough to gaze at them.

Peter Gentenaar, a Dutch print maker who started working as a graphic artist, gradually developed into a paper sculptor as he discovered that the engravings he was making had a particularly deep relief which could not be filled by common commercial paper. From that stage on, and with the help of the Royal Dutch Paper Factory, he built a beater following a design of his own creation, which processes and mills long-fibre paper pulp into the kind of material he devised.

Gentenaar then found out the added potential he could introduce into wet paper if reinforced with very fine bamboo ribs. His sculptures start as two-dimensional coloured sheets of pulp he lays on his vacuum table, to which he then introduces shape and volume by simultaneously drying and shrinking the material. This was the source of an unending flow of dreamlike artworks springing from his fertile imagination and the starting point of his applauded career as a paper sculptor.

In fact, his fantastic ethereal creations, in their amorphous characteristic yet full of texture and colour, offer themselves to viewers in their sensuous organic curves which, according to Peter Gentenaar, resemble or evoke slowly curling autumn leaves. They defy any conventional idea one could have about the common everyday use of a material such as paper and surprise for their size, lightness and oneiric shapes.

However, more than one hundred of Peter Gentenaar’s paper sculptures were to gain even more appeal and aura when displayed inside the French abbey church of Saint Riquier in honour of the 25th edition of the local classical music festival. Suspended from the Gothic arches of the centuries-old structure (built in 638), Gentenaar’s multi-coloured sculptures seem to echo the curves of the vaults and pillars of the church interior, lightly hovering inside the towering space flooded by light pouring from the tall windows decorated with colourful stained glass.
 

This offered viewers a most fantastic and dream-like vision, almost as if they had entered a magic realm where beauty reigns, senses are enhanced, imagination stirred and visitors are invited to become part of a fairy tale where they can fly on the wings of dreams.