mark francis visualizes sound and frequency in chroma exhibition

MARK FRANCIS TURNS SOUND INTO COLOR

With Chroma, Bernhard Knaus Fine Art presents a new body of work by Northern Irish painter Mark Francis, whose abstractions operate somewhere between what can be seen and what might almost be heard. On view from September 5 to November 21, 2026, the exhibition brings together paintings shaped by sound, frequency, and resonance, with vibrating fields of color, pulsating lines, and tightly structured rhythms turning the canvas into something closer to a visual soundscape.

For Francis, color behaves less like a static surface than an acoustic phenomenon. Lines appear to oscillate, overlap, and reverberate across the paintings, producing compositions that suggest echoes or layered frequencies without illustrating them literally. Titles including Sound Echo, Metronomic Sound, and Veil offer a few clues, but stop short of telling viewers exactly what they are looking at. Instead, the works occupy a deliberately unstable territory where seeing begins to borrow some of the language of listening.

Signals, 2026 | courtesy of Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Frankfurt am Main

SCIENCE BECOMES A STARTING POINT, NOT AN ANSWER

The paintings often begin with structures recalling microscopic images, crystalline formations, networks, and cellular systems. Francis has long drawn from mathematical and biological models, particularly the hidden patterns revealed through scientific imaging. Rather than reproducing these systems faithfully, however, he removes them from their original context and treats their geometries as triggers for painting, allowing scientific order to gradually slip into something far less measurable.

As each composition develops, those initial structures begin to dissolve. Their origins remain only as traces: a grid that seems to fade, a line that vibrates without quite settling, or a pattern that feels familiar but refuses to become recognizable. This state between precision and ambiguity gives the paintings their tension. There is enough structure to suggest that something is happening beneath the surface, though thankfully no microscope is required to find out what.

Sonic Reflection, 2026 | courtesy of Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Frankfurt am Main

CHROMA LETS CONTROL AND CHANCE SHARE THE CANVAS

That push and pull continues in Francis’ working process. His paintings are carefully conceived but often executed alla prima, allowing the image to develop directly on the canvas while paint, surface, gesture, and color respond to one another in real time. Planning provides the framework, while spontaneity introduces disruption, leaving control and chance to negotiate the final composition between themselves.

The resulting works function less as fixed images than as experiential fields of color, rhythm, and resonance. Chroma takes its title from the idea of a broad spectrum of sensory frequencies, proposing sound as something that shapes environments and perception even when it cannot be seen. Francis gives those invisible forces a painterly presence without attempting to pin them down. Alongside the Frankfurt exhibition, his work is also presented in Sea of Sound for the Republic of San Marino at the 2026 Venice Biennale, extending his investigation into that curious territory where the eye, apparently, develops an ear.

Audio Code, 2026 | courtesy of Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Frankfurt am Main