Frank Mann's Oculus: Globes That Float Through the Cosmos

Frank Mann, Oculus no. 15.

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST November 27, 2024

Can abstract paintings deal with real life subject matter? Well, of course. "It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints, as long as it is well painted,” Mark Rothko wrote in a 1943 letter to the New York Times, co-signed by Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, "This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.”  But what are such abstractions actually about? Artists have given their own answers. Very different answers. Mondrian wrote that what he was after was “not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality”. Franz Kline, the Ab Ex, observed “The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: Does the painter's emotion come across?”

Frank Mann, the New York artist, who has shown widely in Europe and who has an opening at the Galerie Medina in Rome on December 6, had a focused answer when I noted that his abstractions convey a strong sense of being about something. “Yes. I’m a child of the 80s,” he said. “That was a thing that was truly noticeable in New York. Content was new. Right? There were all these waves, different forms of conceptualism. That’s where I started.”

As to what Mann’s works are about,  Oculus, the name of the series he is showing, clues you in, this being the Latin word for eye. “It’s not about what I see and it’s not about a particular way of seeing,” Mann says. “It’s about the entire sensory experience of seeing. The eye is the dominant sense of the planet’s dominant species. My primary impulse is to work from the inside out. It’s not something I see and it’s not something real cool on the computer. The content is the experience itself.”

Mann’s channeling of science wasn’t just a cool art move. He had studied the life sciences and biology under a geneticist until he was 22. A couple of years later he went on an art school in Washington DC, determined to make art, but his interest in hard science persisted, and the twin passions were brought together by his discovery of Hasan Ibn al-Haythem, a Tenth Century mathematician and physicist in Basra, Iraq, who is considered the father of modern optics.

Frank Mann, Oculus no. 7.

“Ibn al-Haythem is frequently cited in the books of Newton, Kepler and Galileo” Mann says. “He realized that seeing ultimately takes place in the brain, which is the very concept that we have today. He designated what part the eye played and how the signals of the eye are interpreted by the brain. So he had that right a thousand years ago, which is really quite remarkable. “Before that there were many different theories of vision. And some people speculated that the way that we actually saw was a light from the eye which illuminated the world and allowed vision to take place. In modern theory we realise that the light from the world enters the eye. It’s one of the only places that light enters the body.”

This hunger for info grew into what Mann calls “an active adult quest to read almost anything I can get my hands on human vision. And, yes, that includes textbooks too” So just how has the sheer mass of his information about vision gotten into his art?  In two ways. In Shape of Vision, a 2023 group, Mann confronted the eye from the outside, looking, for instance, at how they’ve been depicted by artists, particularly the Surrealists. In a second series, Icon, he dealt with how images can have a momentary life within the eye. “When you get a glimpse of something, a quick take,” he  says. “It’s the image that appears on the back of the retina. It just manifests for a few seconds.” He adds. “So. by the time I got to the Oculus I was already inside the body.”

The name matters. It’s the name of an opening in the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, one of the most remarkable buildings to have survived from ancient Rome, now a church, and the oculus is in the roof, forever open, looking out on the sky, like an eye. Hence its ancient name. Mann has its physical details inscribed on his studio ceiling. “So these things came together for me in Oculus,” Mann says. “I think of it as a cycle rather than a series because inevitably things repeat over time. So I think of the Oculus as inside the body - and it reflects aspects of seeing. You could think of it as an inner vision but I also go back to this idea of a window penetrated by natural light - and about thirty paintings have been generated by that thing.” 

So it’s all about our ordinary process of seeing, of looking at what is around us. The globes that float through Mann’s paintings don’t merely reference popular imagery of the cosmos but focus attention upon the physical nature of what Mann calls “the globe of the eye, the eyeball itself.” As with Oculus 31 in which he notes “that line from the upper left corner simulates what might be the light meeting the eye.”

Arising from this Mann has specific ambitions for the real life effects of his work. “I think the ultimate goal would be an awareness that you would look for in the viewer,” he says. “Where the possibility exists that you would create a dialog that opens up the viewer, to be more aware of how they look at art. To be more conscious of the process of just seeing.” WM