“In the Studio” Visiting artists in their workspaces, among works in progress, waiting to be exhibited. Artists at rest, in turmoil, in the midst of research, or questioning themselves. Third episode with Cyrielle Gulacsy.
Cyrielle Gulacsy is not exactly a photographer. She moves between painting, sculpture and photography, drawing on physics as much as biology to shape an artistic practice structured by colour, matter and language. Her work unfolds as research at the crossroads of disciplines, ignoring labels and rigid categories, where astrophysics and life sciences mingle with curiosity. Whether in her acrylic canvases dotted with constellations or in her photographic series Terrestrial Light, a continuous thread runs through her work, driven by the same fascination: light.
Becoming an artist, if such a path can be called linear, often involves renunciations and sometimes abandonments. In her case, during the years of experimentation and major decisions, Cyrielle Gulacsy had hoped to pursue scientific studies. Life ultimately kept her away from laboratories, large-scale experiments and the path of academic research. Yet she retained from scientific inquiry a form of discipline and an empirical approach that now informs her artistic practice.
The acrylic paintings in her series Visible Light (2018–2026) reveal a desire to push a pictorial technique that might too easily be reduced to a pointillist gesture. Yet this approach also reveals a field vast enough for her to explore, for nearly a decade, the full range of the colour spectrum. With this series, Cyrielle Gulacsy aligns herself with the thinking of artist Ágnes Dénes, who wrote in her 1969 manifesto of wanting to persist in an eternal search.
Her acrylic paintings appear as a perpetual beginning again, where the artist paints “particles of light, pictures in paint, point by point.” The work stretches the sensitive skin of light, “both wave and particle.” Through different formats, she has focused on visible light, which nonetheless represents only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays to radio waves. She paints in a way similar to a scientist testing hypotheses without confining herself to them, driven instead by curiosity about what experimentation might reveal. Through painting, she has sought to capture the mirage of light, its ability to form a composite whole charged with a multitude of information.
This fascination with what is invisible, however, is not simply repetition. This long-term series itself contains subtle variations. In her studio, hung one after the other on the wall in a surprisingly clear November light, her most recent paintings exhaust a light that has become crepuscular, fading toward grey. This shift in her work highlights, on the one hand, the illusion of the beauty of sunset, magnified by polluted particles in the air, and on the other, a movement in her own sensitivity toward a more political field.
“Painting had to go beyond an intimate gesture. It had to have an impact on the viewer.” In these works a more precise intention emerges: to reposition light as a more ontological experience of life. Yet a paradox gradually appears in her practice. Her work is shaped by light while remaining devoid of life. “I had previously explored invisible phenomena such as space-time or magnetic fields, but something was missing: the living.”
In his book The Best Trick of Light (Odile Jacob, 2021), astrophysicist David Elbaz explains that matter assembles thanks to light and that the more complex a structure is, the more photons it emits. In this book, which became foundational for the artist, he cites bright stars, planetary systems and even life itself as sources saturated with light. Light actively shapes the organisation of systems and living beings. It carries energy, acts on matter and drives physical processes. Yet it remains an invisible actor.
“One square centimetre of living body proportionally emits far more photons than the Sun. That idea shook me. It intimately linked light and life.” Cyrielle Gulacsy then set out to see this invisible light. Using a thermal camera, normally employed to detect heat sources or monitor human movement, she rises at dawn before the first rays warm the living world and films plants and gardens, capturing small stars rushing through her frame. “One day I saw an extremely bright point appear, like a star in a cloud of gas. It was a bee.”
The bee then became the subject of a new exploration, once again both scientific and sensitive, and even political given the decline of species. These small flying stars, these winged spheres of light, are fixed in her lens through cyanotype. This photographic technique, invented in the nineteenth century by John William Herschel, allows ultraviolet radiation to be fixed onto light-sensitive paper. “It gave me a way to print the invisible using the visible,” she explains, while embedding in the viewer’s imagination the flight of bees within starry skies.
The series Terrestrial Light thus forms constellations of obsessive ultramarine blue, crossed by tiny, intensely luminous marks. They resemble stars at first glance, fragments of spectra or distant presences. Only later does the illusion reveal itself, made possible by a living world that becomes an invisible territory, even in its smallest forms of life. A territory as fascinating, and as full of possibilities, as the infinite unknown of space.
With Terrestrial Light, Cyrielle Gulacsy also seeks to affirm an emotional relationship with living beings. Another influence on her work is philosopher Baptiste Morizot, who in his book Ways of Being Alive (Actes Sud, 2019) describes a diminished sensitivity toward what we no longer encounter. In this essay, Morizot argues that humans have gradually separated their lives from other living forms, placing humanity on one side and nature on the other. This division contributes to our inability to think through the ecological crisis that surrounds us. It is not only the disappearance of species or climate disruption, underpinned by a political crisis, but also a crisis in the human relationship with the living world, and therefore a crisis of sensitivity.
This is visible, for instance, in urban habits where people can no longer name living species, such as birds or trees. “Without an emotional relationship, it is difficult to care. If art has a role to play today, it is precisely here: to recreate emotion and attention toward forms of life that have become emotionally invisible.” The artist also speaks of adapting methods of interspecies diplomacy to her artistic practice, an ethic coupled with a practice aimed at developing a continuous and balanced relationship with living beings while resisting domination and exploitation.
Radiant light acts as a constant fascination in Cyrielle Gulacsy’s artistic work, whether it comes from gigantic stars or from bees, from astrophysical vastness or from the smallest forms of nature. This radiance acts on the artist almost like a blinding force, nourishing her work, which will soon take shape in an installation to be presented in Italy.
At the Museo Sant’Orsola, Cyrielle Gulacsy will imagine her constellations of bees nesting in the ceiling of one of the domes of the Florentine church. Her cyanotypes will create a bridge between the blues made from lapis lazuli or azurite applied to ceilings during the Renaissance to evoke an eternal divine order, and the living presence of bees, today among the most fragile yet also among the most luminous. Her gesture becomes a form of symbiosis between the poet and the scientist. In a way, it rejects the contemporary urge toward classification and specialisation.
Beyond its rigorous sensitivity and playful attentiveness, her work seeks above all to open itself, to multiply across spaces and disciplines. “That is where I try to situate myself,” she says in her studio, where the distant light of a winter morning drifts through the room, recalling the Renaissance ideal in which art, science and philosophy formed a continuum of knowledge. Her work moves between these porous disciplines, somewhere along the many threads of light.
Arthur Dayras
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