Art Review

Seductive Dots: Mark Francis gets down to essentials in his recent paintings and monotypes at Kohn Turner Gallery--essentials of geometry (dot and line), of life on a microscopic level and of sensual beauty, which is one of the traditional basics of painting. The Irish-born artist, who lives in London, bases his images on microscopic photographs made for medical purposes, but they hold their own easily as pure, seductive abstractions.

In “Gyration,” a line studded with dots (like loosely strung beads) loops and dances against a ground of brilliant sunflower gold--an echo of Pollock, slowed down, the skeins separated out. In two other paintings, Francis sensualizes another network of lines, the grid, turning it into a pliable, undulating weave. The vertical and horizontal scaffolding, again punctuated by dots, warps and sways against an intense crimson ground in one of the works, a soft gray in the other.

Throughout his work, Francis gently smears the paint, blurring the lines and dots to simulate the ghost trails in photographs of moving objects. The sense of internal motion is furthered by the play of the matte dots against glossy surrounds.

Francis isolates those dots in his two “Growth” paintings, crowding the surface with chains of them that suggest cell division and multiplication. The biological origins of the imagery carry neither malignant nor benign associations. Rather, the paintings have a cool neutrality about them, a sense of harmonious balance--that of the forces of order and randomness in precious equilibrium.

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* Kohn Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 854-5400, through May 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.