Francesca Mollet quickly captured the attention of curators and collectors with her molten abstractions, which evoke and embrace the pure alchemical magic of painting to imitate the perpetual flow of matter and energy – the origins of everything. Her paintings create sensual, poetic, almost whimsical spaces, exploring how completely abstract landscapes and mental landscapes can evoke and evoke the subtle sensations, hallucinations and visions associated with our relationship with the physical world.
We met as she was nearing the completion of an installation for her latest show at GRIMM in New York, where Mollet describes her process as beginning with structure but remaining open to chance, sensation and revision. Its first resolutions are often formal: zones of density and dynamism between different spatial fronts. From there, the works evolve through layers, interruptions, and adjustments, moving in and out of the work mentally as much as physically. Light becomes an important indicator in determining composition. “There might be an idea of light, then transformation and then very deep darkness. That becomes the structure of the beginning,” she explained. “I’m very interested in the relationship with space, and how the body relates to it.”
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“Buried shadow“ |
Although abstract, her paintings, through an accumulation of almost architectural layers, ultimately suggest landscapes or urban landscapes in which the body is included and invited. Mollet’s physical involvement, especially in larger formats, is a vital part of the process. Large paintings may start on a wall, but they are often tilted or repositioned so you can access them differently, building up layer by layer, their dense surfaces retaining traces that appear petrified. “I love the idea of intertwining with drawing,” she said. “With a palette knife, you can remove parts and smooth them out, so the material is always changing.”
She deliberately treats paint as an active substance, exploring how colors emerge as a result of pigments mixing, removing and dragging across the surface, alternating between excavation and addition: “Colors emerge through feeling. One color suggests another, or I try to offer something unexpected.”
Mullite lines and charcoal marks often remain visible because they maintain a temporary quality, making “lightness contrast with the density of the painted surface.” Her technique is almost collage-like, a continuous problem-solving through which she opens up space, introducing pauses into gestural and tactile fields of color.
While some of her works refer to interiors, landscapes or figures, they do not begin with a literal image in her mind. On the contrary, the paintings themselves seem to generate images after the fact, forms that surface from the unconscious. Each painting is a series of thresholds, moments and places that exist to give form to the material: fleeting sensations that only find their form in the space of mental development and recognition. In this way, Mullet’s work is a constant interrogation of how to navigate between what is perceived and what is imagined, which then becomes symbolic form, concept or world.
She admits that this may be related to memory and the subconscious. “When you paint, you can remember different versions of the painting before it changed. You are aware of the past painting and how it still exists,” she said. “I find the composition in the process. I might have a strong idea about some parts, but then the painting changes.”
One act in a GRIMM show, Share to share (2026), connected to a real place near her home: a bridge over a buried canal. But through the light, the structure surrounding him disappeared. “There’s a kind of tension in erasing everything and restarting,” Mullett explained. “I like to let things emerge. Sometimes I keep something because it came about almost by accident, like a sample or part that opens up into something else.”
In her smaller paintings, changes in register occur more dramatically, as she often works in intervals, adding layer and then leaving the painting alone for a long time. In larger works, the space can expand into something more atmospheric or architectural. Growing up in the countryside outside London, nature is also an important undercurrent in Mullett’s work – an image and atmosphere that she has simply absorbed and is trying to find through the process. But she explained that her paintings do not depict nature in the literal sense, but rather find a kind of brilliance in light, shadow, atmosphere, and a sense of spatial pressure.
For the exhibition at GRIMM, she wanted each painting to look distinct, which made installation particularly difficult. The works can certainly be taken individually, but they also form a path or sequence when placed together. There is a constant tension between light and shadow, between the abstract and the recognizable, between the indecipherability of indefinitely layered surfaces and images that offer stronger hints of landscape, interior or form. Mullett pointed out that light is the single most important connecting element.
During our conversation, she emphasized that she approaches drawing as a record of perception, an imitation of the way we encounter the world. It is an exercise of embodied sensation through drawing that links to the phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty: perception as a fluid negotiation between eye, body and world. In Mollet’s work, vision is never stable or purely visual; Instead, it depicts the world as it comes to our senses, before it is transformed into knowledge. The surface of the painting becomes a threshold where matter and consciousness meet, where color, memory, body, sensation, and the impulse of the mind converge to create meaning out of unstable forms and fleeting sensations: fused mental landscapes of how we navigate the world.
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