Color Theory is a series of drawings that reconstructs the history of different color systems developed in the fields of philosophy, poetry, physics, and chemistry from the time of the Greeks to the present. Each drawing bears the name of the author on which it is based and represents his scheme. Some of the drawings are copies of the original schemes and others are freer interpretations.

The series is based on research into theoretical disputes on the behavior of light color and pigment color. A great many theories have been written on how vision and the visual are constructed and on how we perceive the world. Until the 18th century, color was interpreted as a magical phenomenon resulting from nature. Plato thought that eyes emitted rays of vision rather than receiving light. While it has been proven that his theory was physically incorrect, I believe that his ideas are accurate insofar as they endow the eye with a poetic drive.

It was not until Newton’s Opticks, which describes white light as containing the seven colors of the rainbow, that a difference was made between light color and pigment color. The Romantic poets, who were Newton’s contemporaries, detested him because, in a certain way, his theory of the decomposition of white light undermined the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors. His main rival was Goethe.