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. With Haub, opaque black and white take on a greater creaminess in resin. Strips at right angles from the wall are brightest at their edge, as if lit from within. Just as important, this painting is not an early modern balancing act, with this strip here offsetting that strip there. It comes well after Pop Art’s and Minimalism’s elevation of commercial materials—and Dan Flavin with his sense of light. Even John Chamberlain moved for a while from crushed auto parts to refraction off Plexiglas, which has served others as mere support for painting, prints, and collage. It also comes after Frank Stella and after Clement Greenberg’s call for the geometry of painting determined by its support. With each color field its own plastic canvas; this is “art as object” in spades. Haub just dispenses with the part about “flatness.” In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that Chris was in my class at Princeton, where I understood absolutely nothing about what he and other painters were doing. (I guess it got me thinking.) His titles effectively dedicate the works to more than one shared interest, most often musicians—and not, I promise, Broadway Boogie-Woogie. Comparing generations is no doubt a little too close to Greenberg’s pat march of history, but the show makes a superb pairing with Thornton Willis right on the very same floor, at Elizabeth Harris through April 13. Willis’s Steps right away announce the right angles, and he, too, composes in color. Born in 1936, he rebels against formalism in his own way by placing the stepped fields arbitrarily within a canvas. That kind of rebellion was going around, as with Thomas Nozkowski, although at times only the color relieves the fuss. Haub is at once more rigorous and more comfortable with illusion. (Robert Ryman would have stuck the bolts along the sides, just in case you missed them, and Biederman would have turned the protruding pieces into shelves.) So many right now have found ways to work between painting and other media. Both Scott Lyall and Charles Hinman a couple of generations apart have drawn depth from a second color along the back of a canvas by the wall, while Becky Beasley has cantilevered black Plexiglas to suggest a physical landscape. Haub by comparison plays the traditionalist, but in full color. .

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