Viceroy

The Viceroy butterfly is a master of visual strategy—bold orange and black patterns that closely resemble the monarch, not by accident but by evolution, a kind of built-in illusion that blurs identity and protection. Looking at Viceroy by Shawn McNulty, you get a similar feeling, just translated into abstraction. The painting doesn’t depict a butterfly outright, but it carries that same push and pull between structure and disguise. Blocks of saturated red, electric yellow, and layered greens collide and overlap like fragmented wings in motion, while the rough textures and scraped passages suggest something constantly shifting, never fully settling into one form. Like the butterfly, the painting plays with perception—it hints, suggests, almost imitates recognizable structure, but ultimately resists being pinned down. Both feel alive in that way, built on tension between clarity and confusion, identity and illusion.