Kustaa Saksi: Aura

Amsterdam-based artist Kustaa Saksi (b. 1975 in Kouvola, Finland) has created his personal visual language. It lives in all the works and objects he has carried out: his tapestries, furniture, and textile patterns. Saksi’s style is a combination of organic forms found in nature and recurring structures appearing in the world. His works are image collages, layered with an enormous number of different pictorial motifs: zoological and botanical illustrations, the visual illusions produced by migraine, geometric shapes, tribal patterns, weaving diagrams, and psychedelic imagery.

Saksi is interested in recurring patterns appearing in the world. The artist's background is in graphic design, illustration, and pattern design. He pays attention to structures and their variations. The fractal, a shape that replicates its own form, is one of Saksi's favourite motifs. The reiterative logic of the fractal can be seen, for example, in a snowflake or the floret of a cauliflower. The fractal provides a cosmic and microscopic scale, extending into infinity.

In Saksi’s tapestries, the interface between the digital and the material is mixed. The tapestries are woven from natural fibers and synthetic materials that create a rich and vivacious surface structure, or texture. The works are carried out on computer-operated Jacquard looms. For ten years, Saksi has been creating tapestries in cooperation with the TextielMuseum’s TextilLab in Tilburg, Holland.