“More suggestive is HUG, which embodies a word for an emotional action in the paradoxically anonymous format of stenciled lettering. Then that paradoxical unit is placed above a vacant rectangle implying emptiness or absence (the denial of both the word and the intimate activity that it describes.)”
Excerpt from Susan Elizabeth Ryan. Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 112.