Empiricism and Aesthetics

Irish Arts Review

Empiricism and AestheticsAuthor(s): Mic MoroneySource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter, 2007), pp. 70-75Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25503624 .

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El

There is a curious allure to the various shoals of

mostly abstract paintings which Mark Francis has

industriously produced since the early 1990s (Fig 3). Urbane, sophisticated and highly tasteful, their

visual rhythms often play illusionistic tricks of depth and move

ment, whilst lightheartedly riffing on the constraints of formal ism and abstract expressionism, they often tantalise the eye with

the promise of information, thanks to their strong echoes of

complex natural forms and processes. Yet, more than anything,

they are unashamedly aesthetic, and like much decontextualised

scientific and technological imagery, often inscrutable. They tell

no tales, nor make any moral, or truly human statement.

Instead, they sing impressively, pristinely, vibrantly, sometimes

powerfully and often decoratively - when hung, well spaced, on

the great white walls of contemporary galleries and museums.

Born in 1962 and reared in Newtownards, Francis has lived in London since his student days at St Martin's and later the

Chelsea School of Art. Interestingly, his early works (late 1980s) were landscape paintings, inspired partly by youthful walks in

the Mourne mountains. However, after being struck by an image

of a botanical dissection, he switched direction into a more ana

lytical way of looking at nature and landscape.

For a long time in the 1990s, Francis' large canvases were

characterised by hazy, microscopic views - rendered gigantic - of

Empiricism and Aesthetics MIC MORONEY previews an exhibition of new work from Mark Francis at Dublin City Gallery the

Hugh Lane in January 2008

4

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spermatozoa. These 'animalcules' populated countless paintings;

their blurred, blunt, tadpoley heads and whiplike tails blindly

bumping and gyrating around on hazy dance-floors of icy, micro

metric light. It reminded one of the earliest days of lensmaking which spawned the great advances in European art, science and

map-making - when the great 17th-century Dutch lensgrinder

and polymath, Antony van Leeuwenhoek subjected every living thing he could find to the gimlet gaze of the new microscopes

-

even his own biologically creative juices.

This imagery evidently provided a fertile avenue for Francis, who joined the select Kerlin Gallery during the early years of

IMMA, then under the direction of Declan McGonagle. He also

enjoyed solo exhibitions in London and New York, gaining an

international foothold. Spotted by Saatchi, he was even

included in the 'Sensation' show alongside the secular royalty of

BritArt, although his own involvement was rather marginal to

the controversies and physical attacks upon paintings which

media coverage of the show provoked in London and Brooklyn.

Perhaps Francis' most sharply realistic piece from this period is

70| IRISH ARTS REVIEW WINTER 2007



PIRICISM AND AESTHETICS EXHIBITION



^Bempiricism and aesthetics ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^B EXHIBITION

Ovum 1994, in which an unfertilised egg of some sort floats

regally over a confused-looking scrum of smudged-out sperm

forms. Although her hard black seedy case looked botanical, her

slit-like opening was more anatomically tender and celebrated

the many fundamental similarities which persist between

gametes, sporelings and reproductive tissues across the animal

and plant kingdoms. However, this trend towards the photographic was more gen

erally distanced by Francis' rectilinear blurring and brush-smear

ing of forms: a kind of snagging at an image which he calls - in his

rapidly spoken, evidently well-worn phrase -

'systematic horizon

tal and vertical brushstrokes'. These neatly create both 3-dimen

sional effects and resemble the visual artefacts of microscopy.

found amongst the jetsam of the seashore. Gradually, the sperms

gave way to arrangements of dot-like, schematic, circular forms,

still reminiscent of germinative spores, yeasts, coccus bacteria,

but often threaded together like beads on scrambled abacuses.

Elsewhere, these dots seem to proliferate like colonies of thriv

ing microbes, filling up canvases in great biological hubbubs -

like Impode 1997, the huge piece he showed in 'Sensation' which

resembles a magnified petri dish of Staphylococcus aureus, the

MRSA bug. Another series employed a motif plainly borrowed

from electron microscopy of chromosomes, all joyously cavorting

like Keith Haring figures.There's a lot of rich, evocative lan

guage in science and biology, much of it derived from Latin and

Greek, and Francis has long made use of it in his ringing one

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Another series employed a motif plainly borrowed from electron microscopy of chromosomes, all joyously cavorting like Keith Haring figures

4 Timre 3 (diptych) 2007 oil on canvas 213.4 x 152.4cm

5 Minim 2007 oil on canvas 214 x153cm

6 Repeater 2006 oil on canvas 152.5 x 122cm

7 Telluric 2005 oil on canvas 101.6 x 86.4cm

8 Arial 2007 oil on canvas 68.6 x 53.3cm

They are also highly reminiscent of Gerhardt Richter's smearing of old family-photographic imagery, but also tie into Francis' self

conscious concern with the grid - the touchstone of Modernist

painting that harks back to Mondrian and beyond. The grid, how soever warped or concealed in Francis' paintings, remains some

how at the centre of his compositional toolbox.

Francis experimented with a wide range of biological imagery

which he abstracted into a rich broth of visual metaphors. One

series, exemplified by Ventral (Fig 2), recalls images of neurons

floating in milky cerebral space, although a sense of landscape

also mysteriously intrudes. The nodes on some of the 'nerve

fibres' greatly resemble the gasbladders of kelp, while some of the

tangled sperm-heads in the 'background' evoke mermaid's

purses, the egg casings of sharks and skates which can often be

word titles for paintings. Thallus may sound like a sex-and-death

romance between 'phallus' and 'thanatos', but it actually refers

to the vegetative, undifferentiated tissue of lower 'plants' such as

fungi, arguably the love o? Francis' life.

In 2000, as a kind of culmination of his biological inspira tions, he mounted a mini- retrospective of his 1990s work at the

Milton Keynes Gallery and simultaneously unveiled his own

cabinet of curios, a substantial and extraordinary museum-like

collection of early engravings and models from the worlds of

medicine and natural science (he also included astronomical

charts, maps of Antarctica; and a beautiful moonglobe). There

were outsize images of flayed anatomical figures of heroically

pouting male forms; and pictures of Victorian patients sporting

frightful skin maladies. There were illustrations of polychaete

72 I

IRISH ARTS REVIEW WINTER 2007



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worms and insects; an astonishing collection of illustrations of

bird's eggs and - the centrepiece of the collection - a monument

to Francis' fascination with fungi and their vast, invisible mats of

underground mycelial threads which climax in the mushroom,

which exists purely to propagate billions of spores.

Over the years, Francis has commissioned - to precise speci

fications - a set of resplendent little sculptures of mushrooms

from model-maker Derek Frampton. In Milton Keynes, he dis

played several: from an exquisite chanterelle to two of the

posterboys of the mushroom world. One was the psychedelic, if

somewhat toxic, Fly Agaric (a staple of every woodland illustra

tion in children's storybooks) ; the other, the common but noble

Stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus, the foul-smelling, slimy-headed

toadstool which pokes manfully up out of the autumnal leaf lit

ter to spread its spores by attracting flies. Right down to their

delicate gills, these specimens were finely modelled using paper,

wood (in one case, the pith of an elder), wax, polystyrene, resin,

dead leaves and soil. Francis has already commissioned thirty,

and eventually hopes to accumulate a hundred.

In more recent years, his paintings have borrowed more

broadly from scientific imagery and maps of both the natural and

manmade world. 'I see things in terms of patterns', he says; not

ing the similarity of emergent natural patterns between widely

varying phenomena, from bodily systems to, say, urban and infra

structural architecture; from the dynamics and aggregate behav

iour of objects to that of human crowds - the way things tend to

self-organise in often vivid 'patternations'.

The upcoming Hugh Lane exhibition will concentrate on

some very recent work, but considering the range of the picto

rial strategies Francis has explored - and seeing as the Kerlin

serves as the setting for Francis' periodic exhibitions of new

17 3



EMPIRICISM AND AESTHETICS

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works in Dublin - it is a pity that such a significant public venue

(which has at least one Francis painting in its collection (Fig 11) did not think of mounting a retrospective.

The works to be shown will be centred around a number of

large diptychs, three in particular of which - Timbre I, ?? and ??? -

(Figs 4,9<SdO) grew out of a substantial, recent strand of

Francis' works (most recently exhibited in Dublin in his 2006

Kerlin exhibition, 'Pendulum' and last summer at the Sala

Pelaires in Mallorca) which are works of extreme beauty and res

onant complexity.

They're literally vibrant: deploying pure visual rhythms and

tensions (Fig 1). The basic template is that the canvases are

inscribed with thin, edgy vertical lines, typically smeared out

leftwards and rightwards, like the parallel, jagged graph-lines of

countless seismographs, tracking earth tremors or faraway

nuclear bomb tests. These vibrating cages fetch up countless

echoes: wood grains, fabric textures (particularly when he

inscribes these images over his sometimes distractingly intense,

Colour Field-ish backdrops), even vibrating musical strings.

Occasionally, these lines waver and meander, or overlap, as he

pushes them into unstable lattices and trellises. As if registering

stronger 'vibrations' along these lines, black masses or nodes

appear that seem to move along them. Some of these look

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streamlined and symmetrical, wriggling upwards like migratory

shoals of elasmobranchs or flatworms. These images are some

times antique-looking - thanks to Francis' use of sepias or rusty

iron-oxide pigments - and endlessly evocative, some like Turin

7 4 I

IRISH ARTS REVIEW WINTER 2007



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Francis was sparked off in this direction by examining an oscillograph of the chirp of a cricket - an idea of sonic mapping which he again renders huge, and then abstracts and distorts for his own visual purposes

shrouds or papyrus gospels. Sometimes, the 'strings' are popu

lated by the old-familiar dots, here reminiscent of musical

crotchets and quavers without their tails (Trama or Field).

Indeed, the notion of 'sound made visible' is a driving force

behind a lot of the recent work (Fig 8). In the new diptychs at the Hugh Lane, Francis forces another

visual overlay onto these vertical grooves and striations - like a

bizarre harmonic overtone - in the form of a jagged oscilloscope

picture of a great, deafening tremor which is registered across the

two panels. Francis was sparked off in this direction by examin

ing an oscillograph of the chirp of a cricket - an idea of sonic

mapping which he again renders huge, and then abstracts and

distorts for his own visual purposes. Whilst harnessing some of

the glamour and fascination of scientific imagery, Francis insists

he is an abstract painter (Fig 5) whose work looks primarily to

purely Formalist concerns with 'colour, line, form' (another rap

idly intoned mantra), and he remains enduringly inspired by the

likes of Rothko, Pollock or the rangy lines of Brice Marden's Cold

Mountain series. As to the sheer aesthetic qualities of his work,

he says: 'the beauty of a painting is very important to me'. Indeed,

Francis' paintings are highly retinal, as they say, jiggering the neu

ral circuitry of the eye, and not above choreographing the occa

sional, calculated collision between complementary colours in a

distinctly Op Art manner, leaving your flickering eye to haplessly push after-images around the canvas. Their sheer sophistication

give them an implied intellectualism, but his pieces do not really reward such literal scrutiny, nor are they really intended to.

Endlessly suggestive but ultimately rather gnomic, some are like

fragmentary texts written in forgotten languages. They now

perch in many prestigious collections in Europe and the US.

MIC MORONEY is a writer and art critic.

Mark Francis New Paintings, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 31 January

- 2 March 2008.

All images ?The Artist. Courtesy The Kerlin Gallery, Dublin.

9 Timre 2 (diptych) 2007 oil on canvas 213.4 x 152.4cm

10 Jim re 1 (diptych) 2007 oil on canvas 213.4 x 152.4cm

11 Recoil 1997 oil on canvas 214 x214cm.

Courtesy Dublin

City Gallery the

Hugh Lane

WINTER 2007 IRISH ARTS REVIEW | T 5



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Empiricism and Aesthetics