Horizontal Composite 1970

Sol LeWitt made this Horizontal Composite, sometime between then and now, with what looks like colored pencil on paper. It's all these delicate parallel lines, a very light touch. I can imagine LeWitt, very quiet, slowly building up these bands of color, one next to the other, each with a slightly different angle of the hatching. He repeats a vertical stroke in some of the bands, or a diagonal, and then back to the vertical. What do you make of these subtle shifts, these almost imperceptible changes? It's like he’s setting up a system, a kind of visual algorithm. LeWitt did a lot of work with the grid, and with seriality. Think about Agnes Martin, too. I can see how these artists are in dialogue, pushing against and pulling from each other’s ideas. This piece feels like an exercise in seeing how much variation you can get from a simple set of rules, and how that can expand into a universe of its own. It's that conversation between artists that helps make art so interesting.