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NATURAL SOURCE

Homa T. Nasab, 2000
Art historian, Oxford, UK

In Roswitha Huber’s paintings, vibrant and abstract shapes populate interlocking mosaics of brightly colored patches. Her enchanted, dreamlike landscapes divulge the artist’s reveling in the pure delight of color and texture as the dense surfaces of her luminous, singing palette cover the entire panorama of the compositions.
In Huber’s powerful and emotional pictures, the paint takes on a life of its own flowing and spreading across the canvas in multiple washes of color.
Her paintings are filled with loose, fluid mass of shifting fields of blues, greens, and oranges that drip and merge into one another. In the tradition of color field painting, by staining the canvas with paint, the artist achieves a sense of immediacy and transparency while avoiding painterly brushstrokes. These layers, in turn, produce veils through which the abstract forms, derived from organic shapes, can be seen.
The soft, nebulous formations, hovering between geometric abstraction and a kind of hieroglyphic, suggest drama and movement. These shapes cannot contain themselves within their prescribed boundaries as their edges bleed into their own and other heavily textured and intertwined fields of color. Consequently, Huber’s unidentifiable forms upset the logical operation of structural and mechanical forces in the composition.
In a combination of innocence and sophistication, the artist’s forms inhabit curiously defined yet seemingly naive spaces. Like some pictorgraphic outline, panels are divided into checkered compartments which evoke a sense of mysterious and mythic narrative. Like a maze seen from above, the paintings appear to represent a series of drifting spaces which have no obvious beginning, center, or conclusion.Motion and excitement are also created by the miniature, radiating lines which reverberate and echo the dominant shapes with the intricacy and intimacy of second skin.
The artist scrapes away the paint in repetitive and progressive rhythms to make the work look weathered, as if eroded by time. These lines, precise and unambiguous, express diverse (organic) systems - the nervous system, the skeletal system, and even the structure of life itself; perhaps we read Huber’s paintings as maps of life’s secrets.
Correspondingly, the compositions’ dynamic force and rhythm evoke joyful emotions, as a piece of music would.
In similar fashion, the artist excites our tactile and sensual feelings by the coarsely textured segments of the compositions, which are created like relief sculpture. Simulating the sense of touch, which has priority over all our other senses, threatens any sense of passivity or safety the viewer may have while looking at the pictures.
A number of the paintings represent onion-shaped objects, like roots of various flowers and plants. Ironically, the single vegetable we consider sensually offensive, an onion, is depicted in the most visually delectable forms and settings. Likewise, in depicting objects that are ordinarily found underground, out of site, the artist invites us to explore the emotional and physical aesthetics of «nonconforming» elements around us.

Accordingly, Huber’s paintings provoke an orgy of arousing responses in the viewer, from ecstasy of vision to hallucinatory sensuality. The modest sized paintings draw us to their intimate space of contemplation, whereas the larger ones demand expressive physical response.
Beneath her seemingly disorderly, chaotic, and spontaneous compositions lie deeply thought out and ordered layers of design, choices, and intentions. By inquiring into the essence of formal order and predictability, the artist questions our attitude toward motion and stability:
As primary colors suggest joyful abandon, an immersion in sensual pleasure; geometric shapes, possessing cerebral qualities, signify intellectual rigor; while the biomorphic forms appear like organic, nature-found geological formations. In her own inimitable fashion, Huber’s paintings celebrate the essence of balance between the organic life, that of the imagination and the intellect, as well as the material reality.