BLACK PLUS

Lifting a flap brings bright color and visual surprises to plain silhouettes in this wordless outing from a Belgian paper artist.

Pasted onto stiff boards, five very simply shaped black animals and a heart at the end each sport a flap, large or small, beneath which smaller circles or other shapes are likewise pasted in to create either a face or an abstract play of shapes and colors. One of the dots on a butterfly’s underwings turns out upon close inspection to be a ladybug, a black dog (or crocodile?) seems to be eating a green one or vice versa, depending on which side of the flap is visible, and one rather ambiguously formed creature is transformed with a flip from an ominous monster to a grinning frog. In the co-published White Plus, Tamarkin explores diverse 3-D effects with cut slots and folds in plain white stock that reveal glimpses of vivid color beneath when the spread opens. Here the shapes are all geometric, ranging from a spread of circles that can be slid back and forth to squash folds and rows of reverse folded rectangles.

Paper at play, designed to appeal as much to touch as to the eye. Both toddlers and budding paper artists may be drawn in.