Francesca Mollett quickly attracted the attention of curators and collectors with her igneous abstractions, which evoke and embrace the pure alchemical magic of painting to mimic the perpetual flow of matter and energy – the origin of everything. Her canvases create sensual and poetic, almost uncanny spaces, exploring how purely abstract landscapes and landscapes can still evoke and provoke subtle sensations, hallucinations and visions related to our relationship with the physical world.
We met as she was completing the installation of her latest show at GRIMM in New York, where Mollett described her process as starting with structure but remaining open to accidents, sensations and revisions. Its first decisions are often formal: areas of density and dynamics between different spatial fronts. From there, the works develop through layering, interruptions and adjustments, as she moves in and out of work both mentally and physically. Light becomes an important indicator in setting the composition. “There can be an idea of light, then a shift, and then a very deep darkness. That becomes the initial structure,” she explained. “I’m quite interested in the relationship with space and how the body is involved.”
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“Buried shadow“ |
Although abstract, her paintings, through their almost architectural assemblage of layers, ultimately suggest natural or urban landscapes in which the body is subsumed and chilled. Mollett’s physical involvement, especially in the bigger formats, is a vital part of the process. Large canvases may start on the wall, but are often tilted or repositioned so that she reaches them differently, building them up layer by layer, their dense surfaces bearing traces that feel almost fossilized. “I really like this idea of interweaving with painting,” she said. “With a palette knife, you can take out pieces and sand them, so the material is always changing.”
She deliberately treats paint as active matter, exploring how colors emerge when pigments are mixed, removed and dragged across surfaces, alternating between etching and adding: “Colours emerge through sensation. One color suggests another, or I try to introduce something unexpected.”
Mollet’s lines and charcoal marks are often still visible because they retain a temporary quality, bringing “lightness in contrast to the density of the painted surface”. Hers is an almost collage-like technique, an ongoing problem-solving process during which she opens up space, inserting pauses within fields of gestural and tactile color.
While some of her work suggests interiors, landscapes or figures, she does not begin with a literal image in mind. Rather, the paintings themselves seem to generate images after the fact—forms of that surface from the subconscious. Each painting is a series of thresholds, moments and places that exist to give form to matter: fleeting sensations that find form only within the space of mental processing and identification. In this way, Mollett’s work is a constant question of how to move between what is perceived and imagined, which is then resolved into a form, concept or symbolic world.
She admits that this may be related to memory and the subconscious. “When you’re painting, you can remember different versions of the painting before it changed. You’re aware of the past painting and how it can still be present,” she reflected. “I find composition in the process. I might have a strong idea for some pieces, but then the painting changes.”
A job on the GRIMM show, Arrow to arrow (2026), is linked to a real place near her home: a bridge over a buried canal. However, through the light, the surrounding structure is gone. “There’s a kind of tension in wiping everything out and starting over,” Mollett explained. “I like to let things appear. Sometimes I keep something because it appeared almost by accident, like a sample or fragment that opens into something else.”
In her smaller paintings, the changes in register occur more dramatically, as she often works in intervals, adding a layer and then leaving the painting alone for a long time. In larger works, the space can be expanded into something more atmospheric or architectural. Raised in the countryside outside London, nature is also an important undercurrent in Mollett’s work—an image and atmosphere that she simply appropriates and tries to find through the process. However, she clarified that her paintings do not depict nature literally, but instead find a kind of radiance in light, shadow, atmosphere and a sense of spatial pressure.
For the exhibition at GRIMM, she wanted each painting to feel special, which made the installation particularly challenging. 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, the abstract and the distinct, between the indecipherability of more indeterminate layered surfaces and images that offer stronger hints of landscape, interior or figure. Light, Mollett emphasized, is the only connecting element and the most important.
Throughout our conversation, she emphasized that she approaches painting as a record of perception, imitating the way we encounter the world. It is an exercise in embodied sensation through painting that relates to the phenomenology of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty: perception as a fluid negotiation between the eye, the body and the world. In Mollett’s work, vision is never static or merely optical; instead, it describes the world as it comes to our senses, before it is solidified into knowledge. The surface of the painting becomes a threshold where matter and consciousness meet and where color, memory, body, sensation and the mind’s impulse to make sense of unstable forms and fleeting sensations converge: magmatic landscapes of how we navigate the world.
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