Mark Francis, ‘Echo Vision’, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

February 26th – March 26th, 2022

Published: April 8, 2022

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Information and exhibition images: https://www.kerlingallery.com/exhibitions/mark-francis16#tab:thumbnails;tab-1:slideshow;slide-1:0

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Nine years after completing postgraduate research into the work of artist Mark Francis, ‘Echo Vision’ at Kerlin Gallery presents an opportunity to update. Its display of old and new paintings in close proximity promises to reveal something of what has changed and what has remained the same. It makes explicit the self-reflexivity in this artist's practice, whereby work from the past may inform new compositions. 

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Decades have elapsed since Francis first developed his distinctive visual language, one steadily deployed in the intervening years in pursuit of innovation and discovery. Its most familiar hallmarks date to a period of immersion in monoprint during the 1980s. Asides from making processual breakthroughs, subsequently translated into paint, this consolidated a shift in attention from a direct, if abstracted, response to landscape towards the forms and structures intrinsic to nature. 

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The motifs arising from this reorientation have expanded from a preoccupation with microscopic entities to include visually rich evocations of light and sound, and phenomena associated with the cosmos. Each painting attests to a fascination with the manifold forms invisible to the naked eye. Yet all are made in the same way; in this, Francis says, he has 'never wavered'. [1] The source material is often scientific, but not used literally. By insisting on never knowing too much, his works retain ambiguity and a sense of mystery.

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The artist's principal mode of making involves applying paint, wet on wet, to usually large-scale canvases. In a video recorded in his studio, he is seen working from above on a flat support (an approach taken from printmaking), and will move it around or rotate it as required. [2] He has detoured into other disciplines, including sculpture, and tends to bring what he learns 'back into the paintings'. [3] The variety he achieves using self-limited means mirrors how from basic building blocks nature creates its multiplicity. 

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Francis has spoken in interview about striving to establish surfaces and structures conducive to realising the images he holds in his mind. Guided by intuition, some are achieved by predetermined methods, others more spontaneously.  [4]  A tension arises between the worlds conjured by the accretion of layers and the smooth veneer of their totality. This is evident when the mounted canvases are viewed obliquely from the side and both affirms and delimits their spatial illusions. Similarly, the severing of forms at planar edges enforces the notion of the fragment while pointing, in our imagination, to continuity. 

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A choreography involving opposites is evident across Francis' works: the controlled and uncontrolled, divided and whole, ordered and chaotic. Believing that the latter pairing can co-exist on a single canvas, [5] he enacts their interplay by creating and adulterating grid-like structures. A ubiquitous and iconic form in our physical and virtual environments – as well as in art history – the grid is, he says, 'a construct which is of fundamental importance in my work.'  [6] Its vertical and horizontal elements are almost always at least implied. 

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In more elaborate and heavily layered compositions than are included in this show, some of which interweave diagonals, meanders, tessellations, zig-zags and dribbles, strategically overlapped lines secure the sought-for integrity. [7] Thanks to figures such as Edward Lorenz and Benoit Mandelbrot, chaos is now understood  as complex order rather than a random state. It is allied to the concept of the fractal, also of interest to Francis, [8] whereby self-similar forms are found at different scales. 

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The first encounter in ‘Echo Vision’ is with Veil, 1993, a monochrome painting wholly obscured by the blur Francis introduces through rhythmic alla prima over-brushing. It shrouds the composition, challenging our eyes to find something on which to focus. A vague scattering of dark shapes, single and clustered, read as sperm, ‘tails’ linked to form grid lines. Their varied orientations combine with the blur to communicate a sense of movement, things formed and obliterated within a compressed life cycle. 

Together, technique and title may allude to the perceptual gap arising from discrepancies between human scale and that of life forms visible with the aid of technology. The word ‘veil’ also recalls the diaphanous barrier believed by some to separate the domains of the living and the dead, and Hindu and Buddhist notions of ‘maya’ as an obscuring of reality by the ‘illusions’ of the phenomenal world.  

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The vertical and horizontal sweep of brush or squeegee, used here and ubiquitous in Francis' work, may mimic photography, convey gravitational pull and/or, as he has suggested, 'echo the way we receive information.' [9] It imbues the work with a range of qualitative effects while emphasising the linear, and the grid, as crucial elements. Line is also found in the streaks created by this technique,