Smashed - Ben Quilty
Squashing linen on to linen, Ben Quilty unleashes the demons of the male psyche.
By Nick Dent
Ben Quilty seems like a nice guy to me, but boy, is he in touch with his inner caveman. He's big on the iconography of the bloke - Holden Toranas, meathead faces, hangovers - and his massive, attention-grabbing paintings seem to have been executed by giants wielding blunt instruments (but miraculously resolve themselves into sensitive portraits when viewed from a couple of metres back).
Now, in his latest show at GrantPirrie Gallery, Smashed, Quilty has taken a turn into darker realms of masculinity. Skulls, snakes and grotesque Siamese-twin compositions dominate these works in oil, spray paint, Chinese ink and biro. In a parody of the Australian coat of arms, a kangaroo and emu flanked by serpents lord it over a pile of human skulls. In an oil-on-linen triptych, a man's head lying sideways morphs into the heads of two crying babies. Large oils depicting skulls have been folded over and squashed together to produce ghastly symmetrical twins, like Rorschach inkblot tests.
Where did all this darkness come from? "I started using the skull image when I was buying kids' clothes for my cousins," Quilty, 34, says. "Everything for boys had skulls emblazoned on it. And I just thought, it's such a weird thing to be instilling in little boys, who are full of life."
An Australia Council residency in Spain last year also had an impact. "You can't help but be overwhelmed with Catholic iconography in Barcelona. I went to church as a kid, so for me the big Rorschachs allude to the way the church is set up with an altar and vases, everything in proportion."
Quilty is a child of northwestern Sydney, whose stint at the Sydney College of Arts never quite exorcised the hoon in him. A rising star since winning the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2002, he applies his masses of pigment with cake decorating tools.
"I used to use palette knives from France that cost $60 each until a neighbour who makes cupcakes walked in and said: ‘That's not a palette knife - this is a palette knife.'"
He made the Archibald Prize finals again this year with the unflattering Self-Portrait After Madrid. The look of despair it captures is not the result of an overdose of fiesta but, rather, a visit to the Museo Nacional del Prado.
"I didn't think I'd be as impressed as I was," he says. "Everything was about the joy of life, or this horrible fiery death. It's so overwhelming, and so, so inspiring. I walked out of there and wanted to make a portrait as though I was gazing into the fires of hell."
While there's not a single pleasant or comforting image in Smashed, Quilty says it's all a matter of perception.
"I had a friend walk into the studio and say, ‘I love that butterfly'. I said, ‘What butterfly? They're all skulls.' And he went, ‘Oh my God, they're skulls!' I love that."
Ben Quilty's Smashed exhibits at GrantPirrie Gallery, Redfern, until Sat 30 Aug.