From across a room and at first glance, one of these pictures could be mistaken for a surveillance image, taken from miles above, coding a remote, complex landscape in brilliant colours. The colours seem to map out a vast territory, distinguishing and clarifying this wild landscape only to a trained observer. But as you move closer, the image seems to be subtly in motion, in one moment expanding outward, in another, reversing and compressing into the background.

Now you notice that the image is composed of vivid patches of coloured paint, crowding each other, overlapping and entangled.

For this is no earthly landscape. These constellations of colour are the subject, endlessly creating and recreating themselves over the surface of the canvas.

This kinetic energy is contagious. It’s hard to stand still gazing at this picture. The coloured forms radiate outward, responding to changing light and proximity, coming forward, as if curiously regarding the viewer. Then, either a change in light, or the viewer's point of view will cause those colours to recede, as other patches of colours emerge. The viewer finds himself moving in, stepping back, shuffling back and forth with the moving colours.


These pictures have no predetermined viewpoint, no Unite form as such, and, perhaps to make sure you can't make them so, Haufschild places these equal- sided forms on a diagonal, a diamond shape, rather than the more static horizontal square.

Haufschild's painting technique is revealing. His process of applying paint has this quality of emergence and recession that we feel when standing in front of the work. Applying paint thickly, with a spatula or other tools, he will build the colour, sometimes 20 to 30 layers. If he realizes he's gone too far, he may grind the paint down, and start again from a lower layer, rebuilding the colour.

Haufschild says that during this process, he alternates between elation and depression, delighting in the formation of the picture, then losing the thread of this dialogue with colour, then struggling to find it again. Thus, while Haufschild initiates the creation of the picture, the picture soon takes over and he relinquishes complete control of the emerging image, receptive to its needs, learning when to let it be.

The resulting picture possesses a kind of radiant colour we associate with glass works, and an independence, a life of its own. You wonder what it's doing when you're not in the room.