BOB HUOT RECENT PAINTINGS
Mary E. Murray
Curator of 20th Century Art
Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art
Bob Huot’s work from the 1990’s reflects the artist’s abiding fascination with the nature of painting. Initially these impressive canvases – like Bob – seem big, exuberant, aggressive, sometimes playful, overwhelming, and emotional. But, as one considers the artist and his paintings more carefully, however, it becomes clear that there is a strong dose of self-knowledge and intellectualism that governs these seemingly expressionist outpourings.
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HUOT
Scott MacDonald
Professor Emeritus
Utica College ofSyracuse University
I first became acquainted with Robert Huot in the late 1970s, while doing research for a book on avant-garde film. I learned that he was living in central New York State, not far, as it turned out, from where I lived, near Utica. I made arrangements for a visit, and a private screening, and found my way to Huot’s farm near New Berlin.
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FULL OF IT
Lucy Lippard
Lucy Lippard has been a free-lance critic
Whooo-eee! Bob Huot’s Diary Paintings! They demanded the kind of involvement from a viewer that went into them from the painter. Hollis Frampton called them “gifts, freely given…made with love…a fundamentally sociable activity.” Which is interesting, because for all their privacy (only Huot can decipher the specifics), they are highly communicative works of art.
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HUOT’S DANCE
Eunice Lipton
Assistant Professor of Art History at Hunter College
Robert Huot’s Diaries are a heady mix of visual high jinks, exquisite painting, and confession. Painted between 1971 and 1975, they are cinematic in their enormity and utterly unconventional in appearance. It may seem at first glance that the differences between the rambunctious energy and emotional searching of the Diaries, and the austere formalism of Huot’s mid 1960’s paintings and the intellectuality of his late 1960’s conceptual pieces, are unbridgeable. They aren’t. If Mondrian’s paintings can be described as harnessed chaos, then Huot’s liberated, if self-conscious, dance through miles of cotton duck and paper can be seen as the unharnessing of the reticence, caution and intellectuality of earlier years.
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HUOT’S SEARCHING IMAGINATION
Don McDonagh
Critic – New York Times
The diary paintings unfurl like a torrential jazz riff of experience, darting and leaping from point to point but rushing forward in a broad gush of life and energy. They are a giant record of quotidian and art historical events plucked and placed within a broad time and space structure under game rules that evolved from the earliest of what might be termed scale exercises to the most recent lyrical explorations.
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