Mark Francis was born in 1962 in Newtownard, Northern Ireland. He studied Fine Art Painting at St Martins and Chelsea Schools of Art in London, where he currently resides. Francis' practice over the past thirty years has focused on making paintings with singular optical intensity — powerful, apparently abstract combinations of concentrated patterning and stark colour contrasts.
Francis’ work draws significantly on discoveries about the form and substance of reality that result from te
chnologically enhanced vision. As an artist working in an increasingly digital age, he is deeply interested in the impact of scientific and technological advances on how we perceive the world around us, allowing us to see beyond our actual optometric prowess. There is sense of hyper-realism to Francis’ paintings with an element of illusionism, as we are seeing something which would be impossible for us to experience visually or even for a camera lens to be able to capture. One can understand the influence of German artist Gerhard Richter and his ‘photographic blur’; Francis adopted a dry-brushing technique, to produce his characteristically soft, smooth surfaces. Through the layering of mediums there is a mediation of artist and viewer with the act of looking through a series of lens, in Francis’s case, a microscope.
There is at time an ominous undertone to his paintings suggesting disease or contagion, a viral threat which raises the question of whether there is an aesthetic element to the microbiological foundation of human beings or other living organisms. Here we can see a dialogue between the gestural abstract and microscopic imagery, drawing the forms of his painted work from the realm of molecular structure out of which all life is assembled.
Francis is represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and his work has been included in many international exhibitions, with a highly acclaimed retrospective held in the Milton Keynes Gallery in 2000.
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