By applying glazed layers in combination with hard-edge painted lines, Mullen creates layered images that figuratively communicate abstract concepts. When creating illusionistic forms Mullen can, to some degree, illustrate an abstract idea or phenomenon, turning abstraction on its head. He is driven by a sense that abstract art does not simply reproduce perceived outward reality but can be instead a transference of that which lies beyond our visual comprehension. It’s an artistic form -- if one follows Kandinsky's take -- that is the result of “an inner necessity”. Mullen creates a complex affect that manages to suggest the incarnation of something grand and vast yet also perhaps just that; a suggestion and not a reality. An illusion, and not the truth. As a devoted craftsman who meticulously creates all of his work without digital or mechanical aids, he still manages to create the impression of reproducibility, which is precisely what he seeks to highlight in an era of mass consumption.
In collaboration with American artist and filmmaker Lucy Cordes Engelman, whom he is married to, Mullen paints as a conduit for her sensorial experience between color and time. Each color they use represents a number, and when these numbers are used to illustrate time the painting appears as a layered image, a representation of time. Mullen’s relationship with this universe began just after he approached Lucy, for whom numbers and letters connect to colors in a different way. She currently collaborates in the production of the aforementioned series, assisting him on the definition of chromatic matches, through brush strokes in the shape of lines in his paintings. The couple’s creative process begins by choosing specific dates. Each date turns into a mathematical fraction which results in specific color in Lucy’s brain. Number two, for instance, is a shade of yellow. “She unveils the codes of time, discovering each number’s colors through her very own eyes. Time and color are the two necessary varying factors she needs to unravel the equation”, explains the artist.
The precise match between pigmentation and geometry present in the synesthesia’s set creates unusual perspectives, and confuses the viewer with all sorts of optical illusion, in a direct reference to the kinetic movement in the 50s. Canvases gain volume throughout the artist’s technique; it appears to look like an encrustation of dozens of multicolored glass plates that move toward the observer.