Christian Haub at Littlejohn Contemporary - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Christian Haub has drawn out been an abstract artist in dialogue with the history of 20th-century geometric painting. His "Float" series of a hardly any years back consisted of colored-plastic reliefs, somewhat reminiscent of the work of Charles Biederman. In his more new work, Haub has not sole turned to painting as a medium on the other hand has moved beyond the to followers of the De Stijl similar as lowers of De Stijl of the like kind as Biederman to tackle the master of the move It is impossible not to think of Mondrian's late works when looking at Haub's greatest in quantity recent paintings.

There are, however, significant differences. Haub's works are small-the largest is a little above 2 feet high, most are considerably smaller -- and they are painted upon wood. The grain of the forest support shows through the paint, especially in Melrose (1994) thereby adding an irregular, natural uncompounded body at odds with the strict horizontal and vertical lines of the composition. Unlike Mondrian, who generally played a small in number lines off against an expanse of white, Haub allows his numerous vertical and horizontal lines to fill greatest in quantity of the painting's space. There is also diplomatic evidence of the artist's hand, with the brushstrokes being obvious in certain areas and deemphasized in others. In contrast to the machine-perfect cutting sides in the works of a certain quantity of geometric painters, Haub's lines, which are for the greatest part of primary colors, show signs of constant try Haub generally uses several tapings to make a line. As a originate the edges are often blurr like off-register misprints in photolithography. He also varies the reflectivity of the paint's surface: a certain quantity of blacks are matte, for example, while others are glossy

Despite the shift in materials, there is a clear continuity between these paintings and Haub's preceding relief works. instead of using superimposed layers of plastic to make his compositions, he now builds up his lines from one side repeated applications of paint. Thus, he is still working with separate, albeit microscopically thin, planes. It is by the agency of such strategies that Haub come afters in subtly varying the regular order of his forms.

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