Most news today does not simply arrive. An interested party has something it wants the public to believe; a professional Public Relations intermediary finds the language, the experts, the images, perhaps even the reassuring citizens to make the case; and eventually the manufactured message arrives in newspapers, social feeds, legislation, or ordinary conversation looking considerably more independent than it actually is. It is so common today that Donald Trump put the principle rather neatly while discussing the increasingly unpopular expansion of data centers earlier this year: “They need some PR help.”

A new mural by LAPIZ in Freiburg-Wiehre, Germany, brings to mind Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton’s wonderfully titled 1995 dissection of the machinery of public persuasion. The title referred to the campaign to rename municipal sewage sludge “biosolids” and promote its use as agricultural fertilizer—an almost perfect illustration of their premise. Change the vocabulary, recruit reassuring authorities, redirect the frame, and something disagreeable can emerge at the other end looking wholesome, responsible, perhaps even good for you.

LAPIZ takes a cheerful route into something far less cheerful with “Toxic Colours Are Beautiful,” painted at Dreikönigsstraße 51 in Freiburg-Wiehre. A young girl dances beneath a bright cascade of color, but follow the drips upward and the source is revealed: two children working in a vividly colored, presumably toxic river. The mural turns an attractive surface into a comment on child labor, industrial dyeing, and the hidden conditions behind the products we enjoy.

LAPIZ first painted an earlier version of Toxic Colours years ago in Düsseldorf and had wanted to revisit it at a larger scale. Here, the building’s projecting bay window neatly separates the carefree scene below from the harsher reality above. The effect is simple and pointed: the rainbow is beautiful, but someone upstream is paying for it.