Keeping in time

Mark Francis' participation in the much-debated Saatchi Sensation exhibition means that he will forever be associated with a new generation of 'shocking' young British artists, but his new show at Dublin's Kerlin Gallery shows that there is much more to this Newtownards-born artist.

'The most tedious thing is this whole 'shocking' shit," painter Gary Hume once raged in a Guardian interview. "Constantly. Like the only purpose of art is to shock the public. They try to make anything shocking that isn't shocking at all, and if it isn't shocking then it isn't worth looking at, which is very disappointing, because I don't do anything shocking."

Hume's tirade tore into the mainstream media's coverage of the visual arts and its fascination with the shock-cult of the young British artist, at the expense of any artist who doesn't display carved cow and calf carcasses or their soiled mattress and its unsanitary environs. If the term "yBa" (young British artist) sat uncomfortably with Hume, a Goldsmith's graduate and participant in Damien Hirst's infamous Freeze show, then it must jar equally or even more so with Mark Francis. The Newtownards-born painter's participation in the renowned Saatchi Collection show Sensation may always associate him with the "yBa" generation, but at this stage in his career – and at 43 years of age – it seems less than applicable.

Francis' work, it is safe to say, has never caused shock or upset. His signature paintings, based on scientific images of molecules, cells and spores, at best contain an unspoken menace of potential bacterial hazard. A fascination with mycology, microbiology and science has always informed Francis' work, with his motifs and images often situating themselves between abstraction and actual representations of microbiological structures.

For Pendulums, an exhibition of seven new large-scale paintings on show in the Kerlin gallery, Francis again returns to his fascination with science – but this time the works are focused on the idea and the oscillatory nature of the sound wave. Considering he is dealing with something so precise and rigid, Francis does remarkably well in plausibly retaining his wet-on-wet, smooth painting style, where blurring with a blending brush suggests a definite sense of motion on the canvas.

Pendulums can be seen to mark a serious departure for Francis, as his work has moved away from the organic and into a harder arena of disciplined lines and rigid repetitions, which the initial introduction of the grid motif hinted at a few years back.

On the other hand, Pendulum is a smooth and fairly logical transition for the artist, something that is made easier by his retention of certain signature aesthetic elements, such as his glossy monochromatic colour fields. These backgrounds from time to time in Francis' work quarrel uneasily with the top layer of grids and images: 'Sequential' and 'Matrix' are the two most obvious examples of this in Pendulum.

Visually, the two black and white pieces, 'Tremor' and 'Seismic', are the most impressive. In 'Tremor', the sound waves are backed by a mesh comprised of rotational oscillations, which lend an extra element of depth to the canvas. Perhaps the simplicity of 'Seismic' holds the key to its success, with the viewer presented with a concentrated study of wave fluctuating back and forth over the zero crossing line or central point. In Pendulum, we find Francis, once the quiet one among his peers, making a bit of a racket – and the silence is deafening.