MARK FRANCIS HARMONIC FIELDS
Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to ancient times.
Hari Kunzru, White Tears
Transmission – Listen to the silence, let it ring on…
Mark Francis is a transmitter/receiver. Had he been living in the darkened nights of blitzkrieg London in the 40s, I rather suspect that Mark would be feverishly spinning the dials like a proto-DJ, in search of stray sonic signals and perpetually seeking to pick-up, if not ‘break’ the code. This inclination, to apprehend his environment as more than the sum of its parts – to make sense of the larger ecosystem that we all function in, may’ve guided aspects of his processes over the years, but the more I look at his paintings, the more I sense that though they arise from close observation and empiricism, what is ultimately manifest in these paintings, is liberated from doctrine and process.
Francis is without question a painter of real consequence, blessed with an extraordinary capacity to guide his materials in their morphosis from tubular compression to the wildly augmented life they express on canvas. The character of the paintings, their openness and conceptual agility, together with his appreciation of music led us both to the first project the galleries made including his paintings – Plastic Soul, in Auckland in 2022.
As I conveniently fall back on music analogies to talk about painting given the (my) difficulty of putting words around the ineffable, Plastic Soul helpfully invited each of the works to be viewed through the useful lens of synesthesia. Of course, chaining your appreciation of one form of expression to the structures and impacts of another, can get you into a narrow bind and I was eager to avoid this – and yet Mark acknowledges that his own interest in sound is something that he has returned to regularly over the last few decades. As conceptually slender as Plastic Soul might’ve felt, it enjoyed an unexpected breadth of experience. As I said earlier, it feels that rather than being confined, Francis’s paintings increasingly exist in an uncharted universe where both structure and entropy are accepted.
When one looks back to Mark Francis’s paintings of the 90s, especially the ‘dot’ paintings such as Cluster No 11, 1995 and Compression (Indian Yellow/Green Lake), 1996, where the surface presents broad fields of atomic animation, you can sense that underpinning his work is an obsession with the deeper fabric and weave of things. Here in Australia of course the celebrated ‘dot’ paintings of these indigenous peoples describe a hovering,
metaphorical topography of their extensive backyard, complete with patiently gathered ‘travel advice’. Rather than this macro-view of the environment, Francis preferred, especially in these earlier works, a microscopic view of his world, where instead of mapping the surrounding environment, Francis appears to be charting our own molecular interior… and it appears to be both beautiful and chaotic.
The atomized fields that Francis painted in the 90s such as Compression (Indian Yellow/Green Lake) enjoy a connection for me at least, to the hyper-dense monochromes of Günter Umberg. Umberg’s works have a sense of atomic fusion about them. They seem to exist as a version of ‘dark matter’ – counterintuitively they feel both impenetrable and immersive. On the eve of his first solo exhibtion in New Zealand, Francis’s works of that period might be seen to express something of New Zealand’s pioneering physicist, Ernest Rutherford break-through adventures in splitting the atom.
Happily, what Mark Francis and I share, besides a deep affection for (his) painting, is a love of music. As I’m writing this short text, Howard Devoto has apparently been “shot by both sides.” I’m fairly confident he would approve, but his studio operates to a broader, more generous soundtrack, one whose range and volume extends well beyond my own conservative position (tolerance) on the bell curve.
In fact, when I think of the embrace that Mark has of music, it might be that rather than searching for melodic diversity, he is seeking the edges of his own ‘harmonic field.’ These new paintings with their bold use of colour and extensive, nay infinite structures, seem to suggest that there are in fact no edges – anywhere. However this apparently edgeless, existential existence doesn’t seem to reduce our compulsion to hold the structure still for a moment. We all may appear to ‘begin’ in some version of statistical silence and end in it, but as Marconi observed – “sound waves never completely die away.”
This metaphorical reading of Francis’s paintings is simply that – a reading. It is an insufficient account because what these paintings achieve is a visual consequence of such nuanced touch and judgement and all this measured against the unpredictability of oil paint. The vibrato that shimmers at the margins of each carefully negotiated stroke gives these paintings the tremor of life. This quiver is the equivalent of the paintings’ pulse and looking back over Francis’s extensive practice one can sense that visual and sonic oscillation is a quality that he wants very much to transmit in his work. As a painter, this visual turbulence and instability is part of its fundamental reception too.
As much as we might view Francis’s painting as a long and patient arc testing personal chromatic hypotheses, I feel sure that like Guston, he doesn’t really wish to understand this mysterious process. It feels to me that Francis has incrementally abandoned any notion that his practice is on a fact-finding mission. The certainty that remains the tired goal of formalism has been set well aside in these paintings and that if there is a fact in play, it is that vision is itself contingent.
Furthermore, prescription – that remedy that gives satisfaction to those wishing to conflate (confuse) decoding with perception, is rife in contemporary painting. Such conformity serves the ambitions of curators in search of illustrations for sermonizing text, but it doesn’t solve the glorious conundrum of painting.
The newest paintings demonstrate, or rather reinforce the ongoing role that disruption has in his work. There are seemingly endless points of agitation – versions of sonic feedback – where the colours meet with varying degrees of impact. Slim shafts of colour merge almost seamlessly along their shared vertical axis, whilst other, sturdier bands jolt into each other sending out a percussive vibration horizontally, buckling and flexing the plane of the
painting, establishing visual and sonic fields that extend in all directions and dimensions – boundless.
Judgements about tone are increasingly evident too. Where Francis was inclined over the years to employ a restricted palette, largely taking his gesture across the surface of the painting – somewhat in the way that Twombly’s ‘blackboard’ paintings of the late 1960s moved laterally. Francis now seems very much aware of the thickness of colour and its potential to push and pull us into and out of the architecture of the composition. With this increasing dimensionality, we begin to feel more complex shifts in tempo and cadence, almost as if the solo act has been overtaken by the band. In fact, looking at complex weave of colours it feels implausible to me that one musician is playing all these instruments, one actor is performing all these parts.
In The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes described the Rothko Chapel in Houston as “the last silence of romanticism” – in his contentious view, art was disappearing inside itself. Like much that Hughes said, there was regularly a snarky insinuation buried in his clever prose… or rather closer to the surface.
Recently Emma and I spent some time with Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross and two extraordinary presentations of Rothko at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper, was breathtaking. Though the works were mostly modest in size, certainly when compared to the Rothko Chapel’s monumental paintings, there was a grand scale to them internally that was about intense vision as much as metaphorical obligation. These qualities made them feel big… or was it that we felt diminished? This, imperiously, Rothko would’ve wanted – yet also improved by the experience.
Mark Francis doesn’t yearn for painting to shoulder the spiritual loading that Rothko demanded for his work. Though they share in the seductive allure and communicative clout of colour and indeed a relentless fascination with the opaque edge, Francis’s paintings are made under secular circumstances. He paints for those of us with eyes open to the wonder of the material universe and liberated from the coercive forces of doctrine. I’m with him.
