These two watercolour paintings explore colour phenomena, a central concern of Eliasson’s artistic practice. Produced by applying thin washes of pigment to paper, the watercolours use transparency, layering, and a recurring motif of overlapping circles and ellipses to create a sense of spatial depth and the illusion of motion. 
The circle-and-ellipse compositions in this diptych are arranged vertically, each progressing from a circle at the top to a flattened ellipse at the bottom of the page. While the compositions are the same in both, the colour sequence is different but related: the righthand painting picks up in the colour spectrum where the left leaves off, suggesting an eternal rainbow loop connecting the two. 
The shapes glow vibrantly at the centre of the page, surrounded by a hazy halo of colour, a relic of the painting process that went into the works’ creation. This technique exploits a particular quality of the medium: unlike with oil and acrylic paints, watercolours depend on leaving areas of the page blank to produce whites and highlights. In most of the artist’s watercolours, then, the circles and ellipses that act as ‘figures’ against the monochromatic ‘fields’ are made by masking out shapes on the page when the thin washes of paint are applied. The earlier layers shine through and mix with the following layers, giving rise to a large variation in hues beyond those actually applied to the paper.