Ces McCully - Monstre (Rose), 2024-2026

The canvas is entirely given over to a single figure, and the figure is
entirely given over to confrontation. Symmetrical, frontal, and monumental,
Monstre (Rose) presents itself as a mask, a totem, and a threshold
simultaneously. Against a ground of deep charcoal-black — which reads as void
rather than wall, as the darkness the creature has stepped out of — the
composition is organised around a central vertical axis from which the form
radiates outward in a near-perfect bilateral symmetry. Two large disc-like
shapes flank the upper body on each side, rendered in graduated tones of blush
and terracotta, their lobed arcs suggesting both arms and the ceremonial wings
of a deity. Below them, a second register of overlapping arched forms — darker
rose into rust into deep burgundy — builds the torso into something
simultaneously organic and architectural. The colour range is narrow but
precisely calibrated: the whole painting operates within a band of rose, pink,
mauve, burgundy, ochre, and black-charcoal, the warmth of the skin tones set
against the dark of the ground and the geometric hardness of the triangular
teeth that punctuate the composition in two registers.

Those teeth are the painting’s most insistent feature, and they return
twice: once in the upper body, where a row of dark and pale triangles lines a
horizontal band like the jaw of a creature seen from the front, and again in
the lower register, where a second row faces upward, white against black. In
between, embedded into the painted surface and pulling the eye with an entirely
different tactile register, zones of acrylic wool and fabric interrupt the hard
geometry of the paint. At close range — and the work demands close range, which
is precisely the artist’s stated intention — these embedded fabrics reveal
themselves in full material richness: the pile of a looped towelling in dusty
rose-pink at the upper left, its texture domestic and almost tender; a deep
burgundy shag at the upper centre, denser and more aggressive in its nap; a
broader field of mauve-pink textile in the lower body, its loose fibres fraying
at the edges into the surrounding paint in a way that makes the boundary
between fabric and canvas genuinely difficult to determine. The paint itself is
applied with the flatness and decisiveness of someone who has thought carefully
about what happens at those seams.

The overall impression is of a painted mask of considerable authority —
something between a pre-Columbian deity, a Fang reliquary figure, and a
medieval heraldic badge — but one that has been built out of materials that
are, at their root, domestic, intimate, and soft. That paradox is the work’s
central argument. The monster is not simply fearsome. It is fearsome and
familiar. The teeth are hard but the body is upholstered. The symmetry is
ceremonial but the palette is skin. The title gives the figure a name and a
colour at once: (Rose) is a proper noun as much as a pigment, a person as much
as a shade, a creature that is already, in some sense, someone you know.

Monstre (Rose) in the
Context of McCully’s Practice

Ces McCully (b. 1982, Melbourne, Australia; lives and works in Albi,
southern France) completed her Bachelor of Contemporary Arts at Deakin
University in 2005 and has since built a practice that moves across three
distinct but internally coherent strands: the monstre paintings, of which this
is an exemplary instance; abstract ‘soft paintings’ in which geometric colour
planes are organised into meditative, near-minimalist compositions; and bold
text-based works in which painted phrases — confessional, diaristic, AI-like in
their cadence — address the culture of digital self-performance. Together these
three bodies of work constitute, in McCully’s own framing, a single language
about how we project, polarise, and seek balance in a divided world.

The monstre series is the most formally ambitious of the three. Each
figure — frontal, symmetrical, mask-like — embodies what McCully describes as
the ‘other’ we construct to hold the parts of ourselves we cannot acknowledge:
fear, anger, desire, the shadow-self that social life requires us to suppress.
The figures are projections in the psychoanalytic sense, archetypes of the
roles we invent to externalise our contradictions. What makes the series
structurally original is the integration of fabric — acrylic wool, towelling,
woven textiles — directly into the painted surface. This is not collage in the
conventional sense, in which a found material is applied to a finished painting
as a discrete element. The fabric in McCully’s work is embedded, painted over,
painted around, its edges feathering into the surrounding acrylic in a way that
makes the distinction between weaving and painting genuinely unstable. The
result is a surface that operates simultaneously as image and object: a
painting that you read from a distance and feel from close up, a canvas that
collapses the hard and the soft, the masculine and the feminine, the geometric
and the textile, into a single inseparable thing.

McCully’s influences are broad and honestly held: Byzantine iconography
and its frontal, non-perspectival authority; the formal geometry of Fang and
Kongo reliquary objects; early video game graphics in their flat colour logic;
the domestic craft traditions — knitting, sewing, quilting — that she absorbed
growing up through her mother’s practice. Eric Firestone Gallery has noted the
work’s relationship to the geometric paintings of Ellsworth Ausby, whose deeply
rooted African aesthetic informs a comparable approach to colour plane and
surface. The Armory Show in 2024 contextualised McCully alongside Ausby and
Acacia Marable as artists for whom geometry carries social and psychological
weight rather than serving as a purely formal end. That framing is apt: in
McCully’s case, the perfect bilateral symmetry and the heraldic frontality of
the monstre figures are not neutral compositional choices but the specific
visual grammar of authority, of idols, of the things we fear and venerate
simultaneously.

The Case for Acquiring
This Work for the Black Square Collection

McCully’s institutional and commercial trajectory has accelerated
markedly in the years since her move to southern France. Her work is held in
the permanent collection of the Moco Museum, Amsterdam — one of Europe’s most
visited contemporary art museums, with locations in Amsterdam, Barcelona, and
London. She is represented by Eric Firestone Gallery in New York, which brought
her work to The Armory Show in 2024 — one of the most important fair platforms
in the United States for introducing artists to institutional collectors — as
well as by Piermarq* in Sydney and Rhodes Contemporary Art in London, the
latter of which hosted her solo Mary and Me in 2022 and has produced editions
of her work. Her practice has been published in Lula Magazine (Japan), QP Magazine
(Turkey), Gael Magazine (Belgium), and multiple Australian design publications,
establishing an international critical presence that extends well beyond
gallery representation alone.

Monstre (Rose) is among the largest and most formally resolved works in
the monstre series. At 200 × 160 cm it operates at monumental scale, and the
two-year duration of its making — begun in 2024 and completed in 2026 — is
legible in the density and confidence of the surface. The embedded fabric is
not a signature device deployed routinely but a material decision made
specifically for each work: the placement of the towelling, the shag, the woven
passages within this particular composition has been determined by the logic of
this figure, this palette, this argument. The work is, in the fullest sense, a
painting that cannot be reproduced in another medium or reduced to a
reproduction: the pile of the textile catches light differently at different
times of day; the feathering of the fabric into the surrounding paint creates a
boundary condition that shifts with viewing angle; the surface is, literally,
alive in a way that a conventionally painted canvas is not.

For the Black Square collection, this acquisition carries a specific
relational weight. McCully is the partner of Jordy Kerwick, and the two share
both a domestic life and a studio practice in Albi. The collection already
holds two works by Kerwick — Looking too closely (2024) and Motor Spirit (out
of the darkness) nº2 (2025) — and Monstre (Rose) now places their practices in
direct proximity, making visible a conversation that is, in the most literal
sense, daily. That proximity is not merely biographical. Formally, the works
speak across their differences: where Kerwick’s paintings are exuberant,
chromatic, and crowded with myth, McCully’s are controlled, near-monochromatic,
and concentrated in a single figure. Where Kerwick works fast and by
accumulation, McCully works slowly and by refinement. Together, the three works
constitute not a coincidence but a dialogue — two artists, same town, same
daily light, radically different decisions. That is a collection argument of
unusual strength.

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Ces McCully. Artist website (cesmccully.com). (Monstre
series artist statement: projections of the ‘other’; fabric embedded into
canvas; hard and soft, balance and friction.)

Eric Firestone Gallery. Ces McCully artist page. (BCA
Deakin University 2005; collection of the Moco Museum, Amsterdam; influences:
Byzantine art, folklore, early video game graphics, social media, typography.)

Eric Firestone Gallery. The Armory Show 2024, Booth 321
viewing room. (Geometric paintings; acrylic wool weaving within surface; hard
and soft, masculine and feminine; meditations on divisions within society;
contextualised alongside Ellsworth Ausby and Acacia Marable.)

Artsy. Ces McCully, Monstre (Aquered), 2024. Acrylic on
acrylic wool and burlap, 55 × 43 in. Eric Firestone Gallery.

Piermarq*. Ces McCully artist page. (Text works;
geometric abstract paintings; the True Selves Project; minimal approach as
freedom through limitation.)

Rhodes Contemporary Art. Ces McCully artist page.
(Solo: ‘Mary and Me,’ Rhodes Contemporary Art, London, 2022; ‘More Than This,’
Breach Miami, 2022; ‘Strange Like Me,’ Piermarq, Australia, 2021.)

Artist Profile (artistprofile.com.au). Ces McCully
profile. (Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger as early influences; quilt
paintings; domestic move to Albi, Tarn region, southern France; husband in the
countryside near Albi.)

Castanier Gallery. Ces McCully artist page. (Identity
and social paradigm; textile work and religious iconography; text idiomatic and
cryptic.)