The work titled Canons from 1990 presents a sharp, bilingual image in black and white, a picture that speaks both geometry and language. A dark field is cut by thin diagonals that divide the sheet into triangular cells. Within this armature a single stepped module appears, disappears, and reappears across the surface. The figure shifts from white to black, from positive to negative, and from crisp edge to implied edge. The effect is not decorative. It is propositional. The drawing stages a problem, then shows how the problem can be solved in more than one way through construction, subtraction, and rotation.

Asins conceived the Canons as a laboratory for the construction and deconstruction of a module. A fixed unit generates a family of alternatives, much like a word that changes meaning through syntax. In this sheet the stepped form is built up cell by cell, then broken apart, then rebuilt elsewhere. Triangular partitions act like bar lines in music, setting the tempo for each transformation. The eye learns the rule as it moves. Once the rule is learned, every small deviation becomes legible and charged. This is the core of Asins’s method in the period, where drawing on paper holds the same authority as a program running on a computer, and where a manual decision is treated with the rigor of a theorem.

The title anchors the series in a long history. A canon, in art and architecture, names a rule or measure that claims validity beyond a single work. Polykleitos wrote a Canon to fix ideal bodily proportions, Vitruvius and Alberti described canons for buildings, medieval and Renaissance musicians wrote canons that generate full polyphonies from a single part. Asins enters that history with a difference. She accepts the idea of rule, yet refuses any single ideal. Her canon is generative rather than normative. It produces sequences rather than policing them. In Canons the unit is constant while its situations vary. The work therefore reads as a critique of fixed models and as a proposal for a living, open system.

Within the artist’s oeuvre the series marks a hinge between the linear investigations of the 1970s and the large paper cycles and spatial installations of the 1990s. The module here is not only an image. It is a device that can be carried into sculpture, into books of serial drawings, and into site projects where sequences unfold across real space. The clarity of the black and white field shows why the series became central to her thinking from this moment onward. It gives her a tool that is portable and scalable. It proves that a rule, once articulated, can migrate across media while keeping its identity and its capacity to generate difference.

For a broad public the drawing offers immediate pleasures, clear contrasts, and elegant craft. For scholars it offers a precise case study in how a woman artist in postwar Europe reclaims the idea of canon. Asins proposes a canon that does not command, it instructs. It teaches us to watch a form learn about itself through repetition and change. In that sense Canons is both picture and philosophy. It affirms that structure can think, and that drawing is the place where such thought becomes visible, testable, and beautifully public.