Cyril Kongo paints the Kongoverse onto the Rolls-Royce Black Badge Cullinan

Cyril Kongo likes to talk about painting the way he says he talks about jazz. ‘You move, but everything stays connected,’ says the French-Vietnamese artist. Born in Toulouse in 1969, Kongo came up through the Parisian street-art scene of the late 1980s and has dedicated his 30-year career to lifting graffiti out of its urban subculture and into the conversation of contemporary art.

With a vocabulary that runs from calligraphic abstraction to cultural memory, Kongo applies that rhythm to surfaces – to haute horlogerie, audio systems, aircraft and now cars. The latest surfaces are for five privately commissioned Rolls-Royce Black Badge Cullinans, curated through the marque’s private offices in New York, Seoul and Goodwood, each one a unique composition.

Rolls-Royce took a different approach for this commission than is usual with art-car projects, inviting Kongo to Goodwood for what amounted to an artist residency. He took a dedicated studio space inside the bespoke facilities, so as to be embedded in the work of the craftspeople – to understand what the house could actually do, and for them to be pushed somewhere they would not otherwise go. Phil Fabre de la Grange, head of bespoke at Goodwood, describes ‘a continuous exchange of ideas and a shared spirit of curiosity and creative confidence’.

‘It’s just like everything is possible with them,’ Kongo says, guiding us around one of the Cullinans at a Shoreditch studio. They seemed to relish pushing themselves. When he proposed colour on the LED headliner, for instance, they said they had never done it, but they would try. ‘I really enjoyed working there because it was a real conversation, real teamwork.’

The Cullinan exterior gives little away of what happens once you step inside. Each car is finished in Blue Crystal Over Black, with the only signal a subtle gradient coachline – the marque’s first – running Phoenix Red into Forge Yellow along the left flank, and Mandarin into Turchese along the right, with Kongo’s tag woven in. Elsewhere, behind the 23-inch part-polished Black Badge wheels sit four brake callipers, each in a different colour, and the umbrellas concealed in the doors carry the tag again, in red, on the canopy.

Inside, the restraint ends. For Kongo, known in the art world as a colourist – ‘Mr Colourful’ in some quarters – the cabin is the natural canvas. It splits into four colour zones: Phoenix Red for the driver’s seat, Turchese for the front passenger, Forge Yellow and Mandarin across the rear. The treatment carries through stitching, piping, seat inserts, the RR monograms on the headrests and the lambswool carpets, all in vibrant, almost kitsch colours. The tag itself, embroidered into the leather, sits inside the sun visor and the luggage compartment lid as a half-hidden signature.

The star of the show, though, is the Rolls-Royce Starlight Headliner, which Kongo approached as installation art, setting out to create other worlds for passengers to enter inside the Cullinan. ‘My art reflects the infinite power of imagination,’ he says, ‘picturing worlds that do not exist, but which could.’ Here too he pushed the Rolls-Royce technical team to extremes.

Kongo asked the Interior Surface Centre to create more than seventy paint colours which he then worked into the ceiling of each car with sponges, airbrushes and brushes, building out his Kongoverse – the aesthetic universe he refers to by name – in imagined planets, drifting constellations, atomic diagrams and the mathematical formulae carried over from his years sharing a studio with his physicist brother.

Set into each painted ceiling are 1,344 stars in patterns Kongo counted and marked himself, in combinations of reds, yellows, blues and greens. Eight of them are shooting stars, and one final star runs the full length of the ceiling – a first for Rolls-Royce, and a detail that only fully registers with the cabin lights down. ‘Each one has its own identity,’ Kongo says of the five ceilings. ‘It is not one pattern.’

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The woodset is the other major composition. Fascia, centre console, rear console, the picnic tables and the waterfall between the rear seats are all painted to flow into one another, the artwork carried across the joins. ‘We talked about how to make the piece groove,’ Kongo says, and the rhythm he finds in jazz holds through every surface.

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Each piece was prepared in black before he arrived and mounted inside the marque’s paint laboratory, where he worked directly onto the veneer with airbrushes of varying fineness. Rolls-Royce artisans then sealed each surface beneath ten layers of lacquer, sanded and polished to a depth that holds the image without softening the line.

What he takes from the residency, and from privately commissioned pieces that go on to lives he won’t witness, Kongo says, is the act of letting the work go. ‘It is the beauty of creating, like having children. You let it go, and you never know where your son or daughter will go, and I am so proud to be a part of it.’

Rolls-Roycemotorcars.com, @RollsRoycecars, CyrilKongo.com, @Cyril_Kongo