Christian Haub

"I can’t call the Floats paintings because I don’t use paint, but they hang on the wall and come from painting, I think they could be called 'shallow reliefs.' There is the physical surface of the plastic, and then there is the colored light cast behind it on the wall. As you once pointed out, you look both at and through the works. I see the works as like fresco and watercolor—color cast onto and illuminated by the ground. I also think a lot about Matisse’s paper cutouts. My plexi is a sheet of cast acrylic, which, starting out as a liquid, is then cut into pieces and bonded together. I am free to move the parts around as much as I like before fixing them, like collage. Matisse’s final work, the Rosace, was a paper cutout and maquette for a stained glass window."

Christian Haub, in his dedication to rigors of abstraction, has followed his own path as a contemporary practitioner.  As a young artist he was very much drawn to color and has cited influences by the work of Josef Albers, Frank Stella and earlier artists such as Piet Mondrian.  Color goes very much hand-in-hand with light and growing up in Miami and later studying in Rome – two places where light is so much part of the environment – it seems natural that an artist like Dan Flavin would have an impact on his work.  Indeed, in terms of structure and the radiance of Haub’s Plexiglas constructions, this is most keenly felt.