BOMB 123/Spring 2013
John Laub, Summer’s Garden, 1995, oil on linen, 42×84”. Courtesy Fischbach Gallery.
John Laub shows us segments of urban or marine landscape that seem on the point of reverting to a previous geometrical identity. That is, instead of imposing a geometry on what he sees, he lets objects take their own shape, one haunted by memories of an ideal world of elemental volumes and colors. It’s as though, in looking over their shoulder at a lapsed order of things, his very contemporary, noncommittal images had frozen at an intermediate stage somewhere between timeliness and timelessness.
—John Ashbery
(First Proof, Portfolio)