Warren Neidich, Joseph Anton Koch, 1815 (After Heroic Landscape With Rainbow)

Warren Neidich’s Wrong Rainbowpaintings address issues of production and perception, reality and deception, science and art, and, beyond that, reference art historical masterpieces. (…) A large part of the human brain is involved in the perception and processing of visual stimuli, and given the excess of digital images today, we are coping with an increasing number such stimuli. Our brains analyse visual information, in order to find meaning in it. However, with regard to the presented ‘facts’, visual perception always implies the possibility of error or deception. Take, for example, the perception of colour. Our capacity to perceive a particular segment of the light spectrum as ‘colour’ depends on our retina’s receptiveness to specific light stimuli – these are fields of research, which have fascinated artists for centuries, who have explored visual phenomena in different aspects, and have translated their findings into the medium of painting. (…) Neidich deduces colour spectrums from rainbows depicted in their works. Transformed into the perfect sphere of an iris – a velvety black pupil in its centre – they now gaze at us from the gallery wall like colossal human eyes. (Ann-Katrin Günzel)