JESSE AUERSALO
From:
HELSINKI
Finland
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Artist Info
There is something deeply unsettling about the work of Jesse Auersalo. Maybe it’s his habit of bottom-lighting characters, or perhaps it’s their ghoulish poses, but one gets the feeling that something is rotten in the state of Finland. Auersalo hails from Helsinki, a city known as much for its hard winters and harder drinking as its illustrative design. On the basis of Auersalo’s images you might assumethat those long, dark months have corroded his sanity. Auersalo’s output is overwhelmingly character-based. Airbrushed to perfection, his freakish monochrome gargoyles are cinematically powerful. They seem like visions from an Absinthe- soaked all-nighter with David Lynch and Ingmar Bergman. Some are grotesquely disfigured, others simply pull faces, but every one prompts a shiver. Their habitats amplify the horror. Peering out from behind a broken brick wall, Auersalo’s face for the poster of Helsinki clubnight Club Misf*ts is heroin-bleak. On another work, a hooded skeleton draped in a net is the ASBO grim reaper. Nike and Nick Knight, the clients, must have bricked it. So spooky is Auersalo’s work that it has rapidly gained attention. After graduating from Helsinki’s arts university, he founded an agency with three friends and soon won a solo project to brand ‘SoundsLike Suomi’, a Finnish music tour through China. This caught the eye (and chequebook) of Big Active, one of London’s leading illustration agencies. Knowing Auersalo, the contract was probably signed in blood. The Finn’s ink and humour are both black. Faintly comical facemasks pop up occasionally - Swedish synth-poppers The Knife have used Venetian ones, so maybe it’s an Arctic Circle in-joke lost on us temperates. Auersalo’s titles, too, are tickling. ‘Oh My God You Look Good Can I Touch Oh It’s Fake’ might be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the gross and engrossing qualities of Auersalo’s illustrated heads - or just to plastic breasts. Auersalo’s letter B for /Grafik/ magazine’s Alphabetical issue was a crunched-up hand, kitted out with costume jewellery, string and a suspicious dark liquid. So there’s horror and comedy, but also seriousness once in a while. Auersalo’s playacting self-portrait is Halloween-silly, but perhaps it strikes a more existential note. By poking fun at himself, by actually poking himself, Auersalo adopts the role of a Beckett tragi-comic clown, or a Kafkaesque K-hole antihero. Peppered with hazard signs, his spread for /Image/ magazine echoes the nuclearindustry’s demonic tinkering almost too clearly. In today’s abrasive economic and social climate, we desperately need illustrators of Auersalo’s ilk to highlight the absurdity and violence around them. In his work, as in life, it is the reality that most disturbs, not the fiction.
