Beauty from a Razor’s Edge

The ever-charming and historically rooted Elverhøj Museum of History and Art’s small fine art gallery turns attention to a variety of work, but the Danish factor is running especially hot at the moment. The focus of the current traveling exhibition, Poetry in Paper, is the delicate but fascinating art of psaligraphy — the literally super-fine art of paper cutting — as practiced by one of the medium’s virtuosos, Karen Bit Vejle.

Bit Vejle, a Dane by birth who lived for many years in Trondheim, Norway, but has now returned to her native country, established a papirkunst (paper art) museum in Blokhus, Denmark, in 2018 and has been an avid champion of this ancient art form, found in Denmark, China, and elsewhere. For further insight, head over to YouTube and check out her TED Talk on the subject.

As the artist states, “If my paper cuts can make you stop and wonder for just one instant, I think this would be wonderful.”

The exhibition is well worth spending some time on, with close-up scrutiny for ultimate appreciation of the subtlety at hand. What we find in the Elverhøj gallery is art not drawn on paper, but made from paper, fastidiously cut with blades and slyly switching roles of figure and ground in the imagery before us.

As a fitting sidebar to the official Poetry in Paper exhibition, one wall hosts a few works by paper artist Rick James Marzullo and his elaborate tributes to milestone moments in the Elverhøj’s history at the 10th and 25th anniversaries. Art by blade is the thing in this space.

Bit Vejle’s art encompasses a diversity of approaches and balances of representation and decoration, as well as references to other artistic media, mythology, and nature. “Sparrow and Bumblebee Combat” is hardly combative in spirit, but a collusion of humble beasts in the natural order, set into a harmonious mesh of design and natural reverence.

The impishly punning title “Cake is a Cake is a Cake is a Cake” takes account of the elaborately decorated cake centering the composition, but the fringes matter: Purely decorative filigree interlaces with echoing patterns of floral and bird life. By contrast, the more dramatic black-and-gold piece “Sibyl” bases its female portrait on the oracle from ancient Greece, in a mystical setting tinged by the bridge between good and evil.

Bit Vejle also turns her attention to the driving inspirations of music and poetry in her line of self-defined artistic duty. In “Ki,” the impetus came from Danish poet Piet Hein’s epigrammatic “Making Sense,” with the lines: “Life makes sense / and who could doubt it, / if we have / no doubt about it.” Her imagery, borrowing from Asian art sensibilities, combines sea life protagonists with a delicate periphery of a school of fish skeletons — a memento mori touch — amid the work’s generally poised visual design character.

[Click to enlarge] Left: “Cake is a Cake is a Cake is a Cake is a Cake” by Karen Bit Vejle. Right: “Sybil” by Karen Bit Vejle. | Credit: Courtesy

Shifting to the musical arena, always a logical inspiration for visual and other artists, the triptych piece “Trio” pays tribute to Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 1, Op. 8. Here, Bit Vejle interweaves visual evocations of musical instruments, music manuscript paper, and more abstract paper-cutting “riffs” to convey her own private impressions of the music’s essence.

Wonder arrives in waves in this exhibition, despite its seemingly lacy fragility on first impression. A lot can be said in the delicate handiwork of psaligraphy at its finest, and most finely cut.

Poetry in Paper is on view at Elverhøj Museum (1624 Elverhoy Wy., Solvang) through April 7. See elverhoj.org.