Haber, John. “Pure Plastic Painting.” Haberarts.Com. April 9, 2013
Haber, John. “Pure Plastic Painting.” Haberarts.com. April 9, 2013. Christian Haub calls his constructions Floats, at Kathryn Markel through April 13, for they seem to float away from the wall. I like them almost as much for how firmly they hold. Haub constructs them from dyed acrylic, cast or cut into rectangular sheets. A separate strip, bolted to the wall, holds up the art, which can easily weigh twenty-five pounds. The work gains in mass from its typically vertical dimensions and repeated horizontals, but it looks ever so much lighter—and not just because of one’s expectations for plastics. I wanted to lift one off its mount and carry it away. It looks so light because it collects light, like oils. The work may sound like sculpture, but Haub is still painting. No wonder Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has compared him to both media, in Charles Biederman and Ilya Bolotowsky. Haub’s broadest acrylic sheets are most often opaque, the narrower strips nearly transparent, with the simplicity of red, yellow, and blue. Both are at once his canvas and his color fields. They also allow a third dimension to the vertical and horizontal fields, coming right out of the picture plane—but they are first and foremost colors. Seeing them as color has its danger, too, though. One might mistake the hard edges, right angles, asymmetry, and all-over compositions for Piet Mondrian in Lucite. After all, Mondrian’s movement did call itself Neo-Plasticism. That (or Burgoyne Diller’s stringent adaptations of Mondrian to Joe Strummer Float, 2013, 52 x 48 x 4 inches America) would miss the third dimension and the luminous.
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