“This monograph documents the last fourteen years of my artistic output. It covers a period when I embarked on two residencies, at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge and the London Mathematical Society, both of which stretched my artistic language and enabled me to make sculpture for the first time. This was a totally new departure for me and prompted me to make paintings in a different way to what I was normally accustomed to. When I began collecting images for this book, a clearer vision became apparent.” – Mark Francis
Mark Francis makes powerful, optically intense paintings that are driven by the revelatory insights of contemporary science. Filled with a sense of movement and vibrational energy, his paintings combine electric colour contrasts with dynamic patterns and precise brushwork. Fields of colour are shot through with orbs or pulsating linear forms that dissolve or disintegrate, mimicking streams of light, sonic vibrations, or graphs of seismic patterns. Francis’s longstanding fascination and engagement with science provides rich territory for his painting, from the vast cosmic terrains of astronomy, to the minute and molecular concerns of mycology. Making striking imagery out of what is normally invisible, he explores the visual worlds made accessible by electron microscopes, or sonic data gathered from outer space. But while the feats of man-made technology inform Francis’s work, the thing of wonder remains the unknowable quantities beyond their reach. This is what Francis uses his imaginative power and painterly skills to conjure – sparking a tension between order and chaos, knowledge and mystery that is at the heart of his work.
