Features
Interview with Daniel Mullen
LES NOUVEAUX RICHES
Interview: Daniel Lichterwaldt
Daniel Mullen is an Amsterdam-based artist from Glasgow working between painting and sculpture. His work explores how perception is shaped through relationships between colour, light, structure, material, movement, and space.
Rooted in direct, bodily experience, the work invites viewers in without requiring prior knowledge, unfolding through attention, movement, and encounter. While painting remains at the core of his practice, he also thinks carefully about the spatial conditions in which the work is experienced, allowing those perceptual questions to extend beyond the object itself.
Your work shifts between painting, sculpture, and installation. Where do you place the boundary between image and object?
The physical boundary of the work is not necessarily its perceptual boundary. The way I calibrate the space allows the work to extend beyond its own edge into the viewer’s experience. I often produce work with a specific space in mind, so that relationship begins in the making of the work, not only in how it is later presented. For me, the body and perception are central, so light, scale, placement, and the character of the space all shape how the work comes into view. Continue reading…
Daniel Mullen: Architectures of Light and Perception
AATONAU
Interview: Ewan Shah
“I think of painting as a way of constructing perception—an architecture that’s alive to change”
The Structure Behind the Seen
In a world increasingly saturated with fast images and fleeting impressions, Daniel Mullen’s work invites a slower, more attentive form of seeing. Born in Glasgow in 1985 and now working in Amsterdam, Mullen engages with painting, sculpture, and installation to examine how perception is formed not as a static event but as an ongoing, relational process. His art is not content to merely depict; instead, it builds perceptual structures that shift and breathe alongside the viewer’s presence. Light, color, form, and material do not operate as isolated entities in his work, but as agents in a carefully calibrated choreography that only completes itself through encounter.
Mullen’s practice is deeply grounded in a phenomenological understanding of how the body interacts with space and image. He treats perception not as a detached act but as something lived—subject to time, motion, and proximity. Continue reading…
Daniel Mullen’s paintings evoke an abstract spatial environment for contemplation
STIRWWORLD
The Glasgow-born, Rotterdam-based painter plays with colours, light and darkness to let his paintings speak to the sense perception of the built environment.
In a world saturated with digitally motivated artworks, immaculate value is smoothly achieved sans the imperfection of handwork. The paintings by Glasgow-born, Rotterdam-based painter Daniel Mullen carry the sheen of digital work, yet on a closer look, the brushstroke, drips, irregular line, materials and linen refer to the hand of the maker. As the layer of paint soaks itself on exposed linen, the appearance of geometric work creates a play of colour, light and darkness. The works of Mullen push the audience to reorient their sense perception of the physical world when the digital eye dominates the field of vision. The artist is cognisant of this perception and how a digital image of physical artworks travels through the world and the perception of that, versus how the artwork operates in the physical world.
Continue reading…
Scottish Artist Daniel Mullen Uses a Meditative Process to Create Paintings as Dazzling as They Are Exacting
"Future Monuments," the artist's current series, tries to translate the intangible experiences of sound, light, and space.
Scottish artist Daniel Mullen creates optically dazzling works using a process that includes the application of thin, translucent layers of paint on exposed linen. For Mullen, his technique is central to his concept. Incredibly precise and angular, these hard-edged geometric works are achieved through an exacting and time-consuming process of measuring and taping his canvases. The artist, who has described himself as an impatient person, uses painting as a meditative process of repetitive movement and rhythm, with the brush working as an extension of his person. Mullen shows with Elan Fine Art in Vancouver, B.C., and is currently working on “Future Monuments,” a series that attempts to assign visual corollaries to the amorphous experiences of sound, movement, light, and shadow. Continue reading…
Some people can see sound, or tatste color. Does it make them more creative
ARTSY
What if you could visualize the crescendo of an orchestra as a barrage of color and texture, like something out of the Disney movie Fantasia? Or if observing a rippling stream caused your brain to reverberate with the musical notes of a cello?
This is something of what life can be like for those who experience synesthesia, a condition in which two or more senses are coupled together. That means that hearing sound can stimulate visual imagery, or a color can have a particular taste or personality trait.
According to neuroscientist and professor Richard Cytowic, roughly four percent of the population bears the synesthesia gene, which isn’t always expressed. Around one in 90 individuals is an actual synesthete. “Some people are born with two or more of their senses hooked together, so that my voice is not only something that they hear—they might also see it or taste it or feel it,” Cytowic says. And what’s more, synesthetes are usually “shocked to discover that not everybody is like them.” Continue reading…
DANIEL MULLEN: UNINDO SENSAÇÕES E PERCEPÇÕES
SeLect
O escocês Daniel Mullen mostra na Emmathomas Galeria, a partir de 30/3, pinturas que transcodificam datas aleatoriamente
Equação das Cores apresenta ao público brasileiro, pela primeira vez, um conjunto de pinturas do artista escocês Daniel Mullen, que vive em Amsterdã, na Holanda, onde se graduou em artes plásticas, pela Gerrit Rietveld Academy, em 2011. Com a colaboração da cineasta Lucy Engelman, com quem é casado, ele explora as possibilidades visuais de relações que se apresentam espontaneamente em uma pequena porcentagem (4%) da população mundial, manifestando-se pela capacidade de transitar entre diferentes sensações. Isto lhes dá uma característica singular para lidar com os sentidos – olfato, visão, paladar, audição e tato – como tradicionalmente os conhecemos.
Pintura de Daniel Mullen da série Synesthesia (Fotos: Cortesia do Artista, Emmathomas Galeria)
Daniel Mullen não é um sinesteta: não tem a capacidade de “misturar” os sentidos ou, como diz a palavra de origem grega que denomina o fenômeno, “unir sensações”. Sua atual investigação está, porém, intimamente ligada a essa forma de relação sensorial e resulta em pinturas produzidas a partir da escolha aleatória de datas que são, sinestésica e cromaticamente, transcodificadas para as telas.
Continue reading…
