Rorschach, Joe, Paris 2014

BEN QUILTY born 1973

Rorschach, Joe, Paris 2014

oil on polyester
140.0 x 190.0 cm
signed and dated verso: 2014 Ben Quilty

Provenance:
Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong, 2015
Private collection, Melbourne

In 1921, Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach published Psychodiagnostik, introducing a series of ten symmetrical inkblots that would become one of the most recognisable psychological tests of the twentieth century.(1) Participants were asked a deceptively simple question: What might this be? There was no correct answer. Instead, the test examined how meaning emerged through projection, association and perception. The images themselves were never the true subject. The subject was the viewer.

Nearly a century later, Ben Quilty would adopt both the name and underlying premise of the Rorschach test, transforming it into one of the defining methodologies of his painting practice. Like Rorschach’s original inkblots, Quilty’s paintings occupy a space between recognition and uncertainty. Images emerge from thick accumulations of paint only to dissolve again into abstraction, requiring viewers to negotiate their own interpretations. The artist’s distinctive transfer process, in which paint loaded canvases are pressed together to create mirrored impressions, produces forms that are at once deliberate and accidental, controlled, yet fundamentally unpredictable – often destroying or vastly distorting the original image in the process.

The Rorschach methodology itself emerged almost accidentally. Quilty's first attempt depicted Jesus Christ. Although the experiment failed, it revealed an entirely new way of painting. As he recalled, ‘I squashed them together, and underneath was this incredible two-dimensional exact copy, but in three dimensions with thick paint. I was so excited to get into the studio the next day and see what I could do.’(2) What began as an experiment, quickly became a defining methodology. In Quilty’s practice, destruction is not simply represented within the image; it is embedded in the very act of painting.

Created during a pivotal period in the artist's career, Rorschach 2008, belongs to an early group of Rorschach skulls that emerged as Quilty’s attention shifted from the external performances of Australian masculinity and larrikinism towards more psychological and existential concerns. While the skull carries the long-established symbolism of the memento mori and vanitas, Quilty's interest in the motif was also prompted by contemporary culture. He recalled seeing children's T-shirts emblazoned with skulls, as though society had begun ‘laughing in the face of death.’(3) For Quilty, this casual appropriation diminished the seriousness of mortality, prompting a renewed engagement with vanitas symbolism.

Figure 2 Untitled No. 1 (Paris) 2014 oil on canvas (diptych) 60.0 x 100.0 cm (overall) Sold Menzies, Sydney, 31 March 2022, lot 39, $46,636 (including buyer's premium)

In Rorschach, the skull emerges and recedes, existing simultaneously as representation, abstraction and psychological projection. Presented as a diptych, the ‘original’ image appears twisted and torn from its counterpart, perpetually suspended between formation and dissolution. One panel retains a greater material density, built through thick accumulations of oil paint, while the other appears lighter, almost spectral, its surface scraped back with a palette knife.

The transferred image exists only because its counterpart has been sacrificed; the Rorschach emerges through an act of destruction rather than creation alone. Quilty himself has compared the mirrored ghostly impression of the Shroud of Turin(4), reinforcing the sense that absence and presence coexist within the work. The seductive surfaces of thick, almost confectionery colour complicate the sombre symbolism of the skull, drawing the viewer into an uneasy oscillation between attraction and unease. In doing so, the work mirrors the act of projection at the heart of both Rorschach's test and Quilty's practice, where meaning is generated not by the image alone, but through the viewer's own perceptions and associations.(5)

The generative role of destruction established in the Rorschach works would become central to Quilty’s broader practice, where acts of physical, psychological and historical violence are repeatedly transformed into sites of reflection. Whether confronting the self-destructive rituals of Australian masculinity, the violence of colonisation or the trauma of war, destruction becomes the mechanism through which viewers are asked to confront uncomfortable truths about history, identity and themselves.

If the skulls tested the psychological possibilities of the Rorschach method, the later portraits extended those possibilities into questions of identity. By the time Quilty painted Rorschach, Joe, Paris in 2014, the Rorschach methodology had evolved into one of the artist’s most compelling vehicles for exploring identity. Created during a six-month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Montmartre, the works that came from this period demonstrate Quilty’s growing confidence in the expressive and psychological possibilities of the transfer process. The residency also marked the first time he used French polyester instead of canvas, a material that fundamentally altered the behaviour of the paint. As he explained, ‘the smoothness of the poly meant the paint behaved a lot differently ... it leaves a perfect 2D copy without the ripples the linen would leave.’(6)

Where Rorschach confronts viewers with the anonymity of a skull, Rorschach, Joe, Paris introduces a named individual, Quilty's son. Yet naming the sitter does not resolve the painting. Instead, Quilty redirects attention towards the processes through which identity is continually formed, disrupted and reconstructed.

Although the title identifies the sitter, the image resists stable portraiture. Identity is therefore not presented as fixed or complete but as something continually negotiated through fragmentation, loss and renewal. The portrait is never simply revealed; it is remade through an act of destruction. Rather than resolving the sitter into a stable likeness, the painting foregrounds the continual construction and reconstruction of selfhood. Features emerge through sweeping gestures of paint only to dissolve beneath subsequent layers, hovering between representation and abstraction. The mirrored faces appear locked in reciprocal observation, reinforcing the work’s concern with reflection, doubling and the instability of identity.

Seen together, these two works reveal the evolution of Quilty's Rorschach methodology. The skull and the portrait might appear to occupy opposite ends of a symbolic spectrum: one a universal emblem of death, the other the representation of an individual life, yet both are united by a deeper investigation into how images produce meaning through acts of destruction. Ultimately, Quilty’s enduring subject is neither mortality nor identity alone. It is the viewer. Whether confronting the anonymity of the skull or the familiarity of a son's face, the paintings refuse passive observation. Like Rorschach’s inkblots, they ask viewers to complete the image through their own perceptions and associations, revealing that meaning emerges as much from the act of looking as from the image itself.

More than a century after Hermann Rorschach first asked, What might this be?, Quilty continues to pose the same question. Yet his paintings suggest that the true subject has never been the image itself. It is the viewer, and what the act of looking ultimately reveals about themselves.

FOOTNOTES

1. Britannica Editors, ‘Hermann Rorschach,’ Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 June 2026 (accessed July 2026): https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hermann-Rorschach
2. As told to the author by the artist, 2026
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Joey Hespe
Joey Hespe is a freelance arts writer and Copy Editor for Art Almanac.

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