With his use of matrixes and delicate biological forms superimposed on fields of variously hot or dark colour, Mark Francis’ paintings vary in mood.
Some series, such as those featuring sonic-looking clusters of vertical lines, focus on a wet-on-wet technique, where a blending of background and foreground is important. See Sonic Dub (2021) or Major, Minor, Major, Major (2021).
Francis is fond of repetition and pattern, and how various repeated modules spatially cohere through pattern, as in Source (1992) and Untitled (2008). He delights in building up visual tensions through clustering and suggesting the opposite through open spaces.
On some occasions, the paintings are aleatory, deliberately including unpredictable quantities within the gridded units, and not sticking to consistent formulas in all parts of the matrix. See, for example, Gyration (1998), Compression Destruction (1994), and Traveller (2007). They remain decorative and seductive while at the same time teetering on the verge of rhythmic disintegration.
