Chroma
September 4, 2026 – November 21, 2026
Mark Francis
Bernhard Knaus Fine Art
With *Chroma*, die Galerie Knaus Fine Art die Galerie presents new works by Northern Irish painter Mark Francis (*1962), whose work unfolds as a painterly translation of sound, frequency, and resonance. His works are dense fields of perception in which seeing and hearing merge, creating a synesthetic experience. Situated between abstraction and visual memory, they appear like scores of an invisible sonic event.
For Francis, color appears as an acoustic phenomenon. Vibrating fields of color, pulsating lines, and rhythmically organized structures unfold a dynamism reminiscent of vibrations, echoes, and the superimposition of tones. The picture plane becomes a resonant space in which frequencies condense, expand, and overlap. Titles such as *Sound Echo*, *Metronomic Sound*, or *Veil* refer to these sonic qualities and direct the viewer’s perception toward “hearing through seeing.” Francis gives form to sound through movement, intensity, and rhythm.
The title *Chroma* describes a comprehensive acoustic field—a continuum of sounds, voices, and frequencies that permeates our perception. Here, sound can be experienced as a fundamental organizing principle: it structures spaces, shapes cultural identity, and shapes individual experience. Francis takes up this intangible structure and transforms it into a painting that does not so much depict as it does bring to life—as a visual echo of a constant stream of vibrations surrounding us.
The starting point for his works is often structures reminiscent of scientific models: networks, crystalline arrangements, or cellular structures. These systems can also be understood as visual analogies to sound—as patterns of repetition, variation, and condensation. Francis, who explored mathematical and biological questions early in his career, translates these orders into a free painterly language. What is analyzed and described in science appears here as a rhythmic, almost musical structure.
As the painting process unfolds, these starting points gradually dissolve. What remains is not a representation, but a kind of reverberation—a visual echo that eludes any unambiguous fixation. The images oscillate between condensation and dissolution, between stillness and movement, comparable to the swelling and fading of a sound. The viewer becomes not only a witness but also a listener to an inner, unarticulated soundscape.
Francis’s working method, too, follows this same logic of composition and improvisation. His works emerge from a process that is both meticulously prepared and open-ended, often using the alla prima technique. As in a musical performance, structure and spontaneity, control and intuition intertwine. Color is applied, layered, and modulated—a painterly process reminiscent of rhythmic sequences and tonal developments.
Understood in this way, Francis’s painting is a form of visual music. It defies unambiguous interpretation and unfolds its effect through the experience of rhythm, frequency, and resonance. His paintings are not static compositions, but dynamic fields of sound in which perception unfolds as a temporal, physically experiential process. In them, what is otherwise only audible becomes visible—and what eludes sound becomes audible.