Books Carved into Intricate 3D Landscapes

See these images? Those are books. Books, people.

They’re the work of Guy Laramée, a Montreal-based artist, who has been exploring the erosion of cultures through interdisciplinary works for the last twenty-five years.He says, “I see that our belief in progress stems from our fascination with the content of consciousness. Despite appearances, our current obsession for changing the forms in which we access culture is but a manifestation of this fascination.”

“My work, in 3D as well as in painting, originates from the very idea that ultimate knowledge could very well be an erosion instead of an accumulation. The title of one of my pieces is “ All Ideas Look Alike”. Contemporary art seems to have forgotten that there is an exterior to the intellect. I want to examine thinking, not only “What” we think, but “That” we think.”

“So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.”

He doesn’t detail his process, but I’m nearly certain these are done by a laser or CNC router rather than by hand, and then painted. Still…incredible, right?