Francesca Mollett quickly caught the attention of curators and collectors with her amazing works, which evoke and embrace the pure alchemical magic of painting to mimic the endless flow of matter and energy—the source of everything. His canvases create sensory and poetic, almost comical spaces, that explore how abstract landscapes and psychedelic structures can still evoke and evoke subtle emotions, illusions and ideals related to our relationship with the physical world.
We met when he finished installing his latest show at GRIMM in New York, where Mollett described his process as starting with a structure but always being open to risk, emotion and revision. His first decisions are often formal: areas of density and flexibility between different geographical areas. From there, jobs progress through layering, interruptions and adjustments, as they move in and out of work mentally as well as physically. Light becomes an important factor in creating a composition. “There might be a vision of light, then there’s a change and then there’s a great darkness. That becomes the first structure,” he explained. “I’m very interested in the relationship with space, and how the body is involved.”
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“Buried Shadow” |
Although abstract, his paintings, with their almost structural accumulation of layers, end up suggesting natural or urban spaces where the body is mentioned and invited. Mollett’s physical involvement, especially in large formats, is an important part of the process. Large canvases may start on a wall but are often leaned or repositioned to access them in a different way, building up layer by layer, their dense surfaces retaining traces that sound almost like fossils. “I really like this idea of connecting with painting,” she said. “With a palette knife, you can take off the parts and slide them, so the ingredients are always changing.”
He treats paint as a deliberate process, exploring how colors emerge as color is mixed, extracted and pulled across the surface, alternating between excavation and addition: “Colors emerge by feeling. One color suggests another, or I try to present something unexpected.”
Mollett’s charcoal lines and marks are often still visible because they retain a temporary quality, making “the light contrast with the density of the painted surface.” Hers is an almost collage-like technique, a continuous problem solving where she opens up space, introducing relaxation within fields of tactile, emotional color.
Although some of his works suggest interiors, landscapes or figures, he does not start with a realistic image in mind. On the contrary, the paintings themselves seem to produce images after the fact—forms from the subconscious. Each painting is a series of thresholds, times and places that exist to give shape: fleeting emotions that find shape only in the space of mental interpretation and identification. In this way, Mollett’s work is an ongoing investigation of how it moves between what is seen and what is thought, which is then resolved into a symbolic form or concept or world.
He admits that this may be related to memory and the subconscious. “When you paint, you can remember the different types of painting before you change. You know the previous painting and how it might be,” he points out. “I get what’s written in the show. I might have a strong idea of certain parts, but the drawing changes.”
One work at the GRIM exhibition, Arrow to arrow (2026), he is connected to a real place near his house: a bridge over a buried canal. However due to the light, the surrounding structure has disappeared. “There’s a kind of tension in erasing everything and starting over,” explains Mollett. “I like to let things emerge. Sometimes I keep something because it came out by accident, like a sample or a piece that opens up to something else.”
In his small paintings, the changes in register happen a lot, as he often works from time to time, adding a layer and then leaving the painting alone for a long time. In large works, the space can expand into something aerial or architectural. Growing up in the countryside outside of London, nature is also an important part of Mollett’s work—an image and form that he internalizes and tries to find through the process. However, he clarified that his paintings do not depict nature literally, but instead find a kind of light in light, shadow, atmosphere and the sense of pressure of space.
For the exhibition at GRIMM, he wanted each painting to feel unique, which made the installation more challenging. Activities can be taken individually, but they also form a path or sequence when combined. There is a constant tension between light and shadow, invisible and visible, between the indescribability of undefined layered spaces and images that give strong hints of landscape, interior or figure. Light, Mollett pointed out, is the only thing that connects and matters most.
Throughout our conversation, he emphasized that he views painting as a visual record, imitating the way we interact with the world. It is a work of integrated perception through painting that links to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology: perception as a fluid dialogue between the eye, the body and the world. In Mollett’s work, seeing is never static or passive; instead, it presents the world as it comes to our minds, before it is hardened into knowledge. The painting space becomes the border where object and consciousness meet and where color, memory, body, emotion and the mental impulse to make meaning in unstable ways and fleeting emotions meet: the mind-blowing structure of how we move around the world.
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