I pick up Hubert — who is called “Pit” (I never got the nerve to ask him why) — at his hotel at the end of a long week he has spent in Bahrain working on a spectacle of large light spheres for the Bahrain Football cup.

Although it is evident that Hubert is exhausted, his manners, typical of Frenchman are exquisite. He gives me his full attention, and a great deal of his time –in a lovely conversation that meanders through varying topics including the arc of his career, inspirations for his work, the joys and torture of creating sculpture in the difficult medium of metals — and culminating in a hilarious moment when we both — using hand gestures, and pulling silly faces — attempt to come up with the word for “grasshopper” in our respective native languages.

Over coffee at the Ritz, Hubert, whose English is actually very good, tells me that like most artists, he supplements his income with commercial work. And that he uses the compensation for this work to sustain him, and to buy art materials he needs in the periods when he is working on the sculpture that he describes as “neo Art Nouveau”.

At first, not having seen his work in detail, I was flummoxed by the layering of “neo” on top of “nouveau” — which, if one wants to nit-pick, mean exactly the same thing.  However, after spending a bit of time looking at Hubert’s fantastical creations  — wrought in metal with sinuous lines, –and imagery drawn from animal, insect and flora — one understands what he means. His work is sort of:Tim Burton meets Louis Comfort Tiffany in a futuristic purple and grey garden swarming with insects.

Hubert toils in a region of France called Bretagne in a studio that he has used for 7 years. He never attended art school, and is entirely self-taught.

I ask him when he decided to become an artist, and he laughs. “I never decided,” he says. “I just am one”. An answer that is perfectly legitimate and oft-used by those who feel the need to express themselves through creating art, as more of a vocation than a profession.

“When I was a child,” Hubert says. “I was constantly sketching. It has been ten years now that I have been working very seriously on this sculpture, which is primarily inspired by the Art Nouveau architecture in Paris”.

Think of the plethora of wrought iron staircases and balconies, winding their way through Paris, sprouting leaves and fruit. Or picture the City of Light’s world famous Brasseries and Metro Stations — most still boasting their original Art Nouveau signage — and you begin to get the idea of what Hubert calls his, “jumping off point”.

It is rather wonderful to think of an artist in 2013 re-interpreting Art Nouveau architecture through metal sculpture in Paris — when this particular period of art and architecture history is not at the moment the least bit in “Vogue” — or a choice of inspiration for trendy international contemporary artists.

Where most art created today shies away from “Nature” and representation with a symbolic twist — the backbone of the Art Nouveau movement. And if one is allowed for a moment to vastly oversimplify — current art is concerned in subject terms with either emotional or political themes, and in medium and composition is often geometric, rational and Brutalist in conception and execution, it which makes Hubert’s choice not only unusual but anti-commercial. It is evident that his work is for the gratification of his creative imagination and not produced with the “market” in mind.

Hubert’s creations harken back to a more innocent moment in art history, where the forms and colors found in Nature, with a capital “N” were still considered appropriately serious fodder for the world’s leading artists, architects and designers.

However, all of this discussion of flowers, and curves etc. sounds very feminine and flowery, yet Hubert’s work at the execution level is hardcore. Bending metal into intricate shapes and getting it to cooperate, whilst utilizing a laborious process of welding and shaping, is not watercolor sketching at the seashore! This is macho stuff.

Hubert describes his studio and his work process. “Most of the work that I do involves welding,” he explains. “And then after I have the metal in a malleable state I bend and curve it into the shapes of the final piece. I worked for a while with an American artist,” he goes on. “Who tried to convince me that it was easier to do this with forging, however I never liked it as much as a technique”.

In closing, Hubert tells me that he has been working on a small scale, but is keen to go back to France and make some “massive stuff”.   He has decided that his imagination is best wrought on a large scale, and if the public installations that he has done are any indication, I would have to agree.