Ins+Outs 1967

Robert Huot, painted "Ins+Outs", with what looks like a minimal palette of whites and grays. It's like two building blocks, a rectangle and a square, barely distinct from the background, that make up some sort of elemental architecture. The subtle shifts in tone and texture feel crucial. I imagine Huot, maybe, building up the surface, then scraping away, searching for the right balance. There’s a graphic line drawing in the left block like a ghost of a structure. It looks like the trace of a diagram, a plan, or a notation. Is that the titular “Ins+Outs” of the work, a sign for some place of ingress and egress? The painting feels like an echo of Constructivist ideas, or maybe Agnes Martin's grids, but with a more playful and less dogmatic sensibility. It reminds us that all art is in conversation with what came before.