Pareidolic vision (from para, meaning “beyond,” and eidon, “image”) can be deliberately practiced as a means of cultivating the imagination. In his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci describes an influential psychological exercise designed to unlock an artist’s imagination. Da Vinci advises to look intensely at raw, naturally chaotic surfaces to spark original compositions and fantastical imagery. As much as it can produce incredibly elaborate narratives, the reading of the obvious and trivial, which invites to see, signify or conceal something else, is central to apophenic paranoia.
With Black, Green, Pink, Scherben is showing the artists R.H. Quaytman, Frances Scholz, and Nandi Loaf. Opening on September 9, 2026, as part of Berlin Art Week, the exhibition presents new work by all three artists alongside paintings by Frances Scholz from the 1990s. For R.H. Quaytman and Frances Scholz, painting has never existed solely as an autonomous image. Both artists place painting in relation to architecture, photography, film, history, language, and social contexts, allowing the work to extend beyond the painted surface and into these networks. Nandi Loaf continues this inquiry under the conditions of a digital image culture. Her work elicits a curious anxiety in the viewer’s search for meaning through contexts of saturation.Together, the three artists explore the uncertainty of perception and how common sense emerges from fantasy. Discovering an image becomes a shift in perception.
