One artist was given full run of a canvas most designers would never dare touch. Rolls-Royce has handed the interior of its Black Badge Cullinan over to Cyril Kongo, the Toulouse-born painter whose contemporary street-art roots now command attention from horology houses to fine art auctions. The result? Exuberant private commissions featuring veneer and leather interior surfaces individually hand-painted in awe-inspiring detail. “When I first saw Black Badge Cullinan, I felt compelled to create my own interpretation of the universe it belonged to…what I call The Kongoverse,” he says. “It’s a place of fantasy, mathematical formulas, symbols, pyramids, atoms and imagined planets. It was a conversation, using my visual language and Rolls-Royce’s way of making, with the motor car itself as the canvas.” Every surface of the private art gallery on wheels tells the story. A hand-painted Starlight Headliner scatters imagined constellations and quantum equations across more than a thousand fiber-optic stars, while veneer panels on the fascia and console form one continuous, jazz-like composition, applied by the artist himself over months at the marque's Goodwood atelier. Outside, a first-ever gradient coachline traces signature tags in bursts of phoenix red, forge yellow, turchese and mandarin. This is not customization. This is collaboration at its rarest; Rolls-RoyceMotorcars.com.

Words Yoshi Sanz   |   Photos Rolls-Royce