Floating Around in Painter Cyrielle Gulacsy’s Galaxy

The chaos of dwarf stars heaving last breaths, supernovas exploding, and black holes swallowing planets is meditative for Cyrielle Gulacsy. It helps that she’s focused on the positive: light-years of distance—a perspective the Parisian painter channels safely into her painting of particulate structure palatable for the human eye. 

Gulacsy has always been enraptured with “out there,” cocksure of her future as a fighter pilot from a young age. In her childhood house, she had difficulty sleeping, staring at her telescope, afraid to wake her baby brother if she opened the curtain to peer into the universe. But, after a life-altering mistake on a mathematics test, her dream of flying was dashed, leaving the future uncharacteristically unplanned. So, she settled on graphic design, focusing on turning utilitarian visual culture into something beautiful. Still, she wasn’t sold. “For your diploma, there is an exhibition where you hand out business cards, and I gave away all mine, but then: nothing. No emails, and I thought that’s okay.” It was a sign she was doing the wrong job. Two years later, the self-saboteur realized she’d written down the wrong email address. 

Spread thin from a part-time graphic design gig, burgeoning art practice, and consummate addiction to astrophysical research, Gulacsy prioritized the latter. She quit her day job and dove into creating unexpected eureka. “[In my first show,] I had the disposition of the frames in Morse Code,” she laughs, putting her head into her palm. “Morse code, right? It was very obvious that you had to discover the answer. It was a tendency leftover from graphic design,” she explains, “I was just searching for ways to make people understand.” 

There is a noticeable absence of “me” and “i” when Gulacsy describes her work. Instead, Gulacsy lights up when referencing Stephen Hawking’s theories of the Big Bang, black holes, and light cones, talking with her hands to animate light’s curvature through time and space. She swoons over potentially evanescing into her process. “I want to disappear and channel information from the invisible to reality, but I can’t,” she confesses. “There will always be subjectivity because I make choices: techniques, colour, layout. But maybe, at some point, I’ll be fully random”—an impossible goal she seems eager to prove doable. 

In the Gulacsy Galaxy, singularity is paramount, secularism is sanctity, and particulate matter is particularly precise. She shows off her forearm muscle from her months-long pointillism sprints, painting each molecule or star in hopes of spurring awareness of the universe’s atomic structure. “Maybe you find [my work] meditative. Maybe you like it or not because of the colour. Maybe it makes you remember something. You can stop at this, but if you ask, what is that? Why are there dots on the painting?” Gulacsy explains, “These are the corpuscular aspects of life.” 

When we sit on the ground, complaining about needing glasses, and digging into periodic elements, she seems most at ease. She views herself as a conduit for both microscopic and telescopic worlds, gushing about light’s varying visuals in relation to distance. Her pieces “Andromeda” are tranquil snapshots of galactic chaos, while “Space-Time Warp” sculptures STW01 and STW02, show a maturation of her process: elevating her previous self-admitted weaknesses and providing a clever relationship between medium and message. Her first U.S. solo show, 'Cyrielle Gulascy: Light in the Distance', at New York’s Mignoni Gallery from January 18 – March 15, 2022, comes after nearly two years of postponement, and despite it being her first, it will most definitely not be her last. Because, while you will never hear it from her, L'Officiel can confirm: Cyrielle Gulacsy is a shining star.