For over four decades, American painter Robert Swain has used painting to examine color as a phenomenological experience. Swain delivers an enthralling and exhausting workout for viewers' color receptors. "Color," says Swain, "is a form of energy that excites our perceptual processes that helps convey emotions."
Viewers of Swain's work experience color as an active perceptual process, an event that occurs in real time. Like test patterns in a range of colors used to calibrate projectors and printers, Swain's paintings reset and reanimate the eyes and body, the eyes, and the human body. When viewed from different angles and postures, the squares dissolve into each other, "betraying" their rigid boundaries, and warping towards the walls.