MARK FRANCIS
Paint is a membrane; brushes are instruments of inquest and yet who would’ve thought that such an apparently inquiring and methodological approach would give rise to such beauty and mystery. Well anyone who’s has looked at a night sky or looked through a microscope and understood that true beauty is in fact not skin deep but is held in the hitherto invisible layers.
Andrew Jensen
For those of us raised on the “shaky isles” of New Zealand, Mark Francis’s painting Jericho resembles the exaggerated sweep of an overly sensitive seismograph whose dramatic peaks and troughs record subterranean volatility. Much of this oscillation is neither felt, seen nor heard, but it’s always there, pulsing away beneath the crust, biding its time.
I must admit that these particular paintings of Mark’s also put me in mind of Joy Divisions seminal album cover for Unknown Pleasures – an album that seemed to completely realign the tectonic plates of contemporary music – taking the dystopian angst of punk and adding a garnish of Brechtian unease and a new refined sense of aesthetics.
Oddly, Francis’s title Jericho summons one of the few bible stories I can recall – the Israelites felling the walls of Jericho with the accumulated volume and persistence of their trumpets – think Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia on endless repeat. The pitch and vibration finally shaking loose the foundations and the mortar. This is surely a story about Sound and Vision, about its potential for reciprocal impact.
In Plastic Soul, Jericho is accompanied by a sound composition by Andy Cowton. Spend time in the room and the experience of one stimulus begins to unequivocally “synaesthese” with the other. Yet Cowton’s composition doesn’t seek to operate as an analogy for Francis’s painting – they don’t seek to explain each other – they are simply happy companions in a space – one optic, one aural.
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The second work by Mark Francis is Transverse Wave. Larger still than Jericho, one senses that Transverse Wave has him working at full Vitruvian stretch, though a recent visit to his London studio made it clear that he is capable of working on even larger seismic fields.
The surface of the Transverse Wave feels as if it is established by a syncopated rhythm of deft, repeated gestures that tug at the deeper structural fabric of the painting. As if pulling on a thread so to unravel the weave – and with it, something of the stability of vision.
If Jericho charts the indetectable quiver of seismic activity, then Transverse Wave also works to make imperceptible vibration visible. One can’t help but feel that we are apprehending this with the aid of a large scope. It is as if Francis is putting us inside the braid of sound – where the scratch, flickers and blips gather in crescendos at the intersections of the painting’s weave.