Klecksographie

Klecksography

Symmetry has been a long-standing obsession. A random inkblot spawns arms, legs, petals and tentacles if it’s fed a mirror, quadruple the symmetry and you’ll find the VJ’s staple retinal snack. More so, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that drawing quaternary images (including mandalas) could be used to create a sacred and protected psychological space.

While I was working on Klex and researching the terrain I came across some other dreamers that had been enchanted by the children’s game that was later aberrated to meet the needs of the Psychodiagnostique by Mr Rorschach.

Gilles Balmet treats us to a calligraphy of Klecksographie – as if Rorschach himself was an obsessive downtown graffiti artist in 80’s New York. This Automatic writing is already loaded with unconscious information, so Klexing it up only doubles the diagnostic trouble!

If John Landon isn’t playing with the symmetry of language his exploring the symmetry of shape and paint, often the two collide and his ambigrams find their way into his Rorschach paintings.

‘The homage to Andy Warhol represented the last of the Rorschach paintings with words reversed out of random images. Since then, the letters themselves are symmetrically created without distracting surroundings. This purer form brings these images back closer to their ambigram ancestors.’

Which brings us to Andy Warhols ‘Rorschach’ paintings:

‘Liquid, protean and seductively vacant, they reflect your own desires and fantasies right back at you. Conceived in the spirit of superstar Nico’s beguiling promise (“I’ll be your mirror”), these pictures will be whatever you want them to be.’

The story of these Rorschach paintings is typically Warholian and satisfyingly amusing.