MARK FRANCIS

Bridging a span of thirty years, Echo Vision presents seven new paintings alongside three works dating from the 1990s, the era in which Francis first made waves with his powerful, optically intense paintings driven by the revelatory insights of contemporary science. By placing these two eras of painting in conversation with one another, Echo Vision traces a line through past and present and demonstrates the continued relevance of the artist’s enduring painterly concerns: sound, vibrations, networks, mapping, and virality.

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 manmade 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.