This square drawing from Elena Asins’s Canons series condenses an entire method into a crisp black and white field. A stepped module repeats across a latent grid, turning and sliding until it builds a compact architecture of solids and voids. Triangular apertures puncture the black masses at regular intervals and set up a syncopated rhythm for the eye. A pale cruciform corridor opens at the center, where negative space becomes as active as any painted form. The sheet is dated in August 1990, which fixes the work in a period when Asins pursued the most exacting articulation of her rule-based language on paper.

The Canons revolve around the construction and deconstruction of a unit. Asins begins with a single orthogonal module derived from the square and its diagonals. She subjects it to a limited set of operations that include rotation, reflection, translation, and subtraction. The drawing shows how these operations generate a vocabulary of silhouettes that remain recognizably related to the parent form. Strict economy is the point. Every change has consequences, and those consequences remain legible because the artist accepts the discipline of a grid and the clarity of inked edges.

The title places the series within a long history of canons in art, architecture, and music. From Polykleitos and Vitruvius to Renaissance counterpoint, a canon is a rule that promises consistency across many parts. Asins reimagines that tradition for the late twentieth century. Her canon is not a fixed ideal of proportion. It is a generative procedure that can yield infinite families from one seed. The triangular “rests” within the composition act like pauses in a score, while the modular steps read as beats that gather into phrases. Viewers do not need to know the algorithm to feel how the rule produces coherence.

Within Asins’s oeuvre, the drawing marks a pivotal consolidation. During the 1970s she explored linear sequences with extreme restraint. By 1990 those sequences had hardened into black solids that could be read across the page with architectural force. The Canons gave her a portable tool set that moved easily from drawing to book projects and then into sculpture and urban scale installations. The module that animates this sheet would later appear as a spatial cadence, which confirms how decisively she treated paper as a site for thinking that could migrate into the world.

For a broad public the work is immediately engaging because it is both severe and generous. The composition is built from a few parts, yet it invites many readings. You can follow the dance of reversals between figure and ground, or you can trace the path of the stepped unit as it learns about itself through repetition and change. For the history of women’s contributions to postwar geometric abstraction, this drawing is a touchstone. It shows how authority can come from rules that produce difference rather than conformity, and how drawing can serve as the central instrument of invention.

Provenance

Julia Sáez-Angulo, Madrid, acquired directly from the artist

Subastas Segre, Madrid, February 14th, 2017, lot 189

Acquired from the above 

Exhibitions

Minimal Means: Concrete Inventions in the US, Brazil and Spain, Zeit Contemporary Art, New York, January 24 – March 16, 2019.

Alicante, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Alicante - MACA, Long-term Loan 2019 - 2025.

El rumor del viento es un silbido infatigable. Elena Asins, Alicante, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Alicante – MACA, February 17 – May 28, 2023. Curated by Rosa M. Castells.