Gardar Eide Einarsson’s series The Plague Drawings, all made in Tokyo during state of exception caused by the corona virus pandemic, uses as its indirect point of departure the present global situation by referring to Albert Camus’s literary principal work The Plague. Thus, Einarsson’s works on paper are based on the various book covers for the novel, which outlines a battle between humanism and cynicism – between idealism and political pragmatism. The original book covers produced over time are, in Einarsson’s works, reduced to modernist abstractions. The conceptual approach is the pivotal point in Einarsson’s practice, which addresses the tradition of new artistic departures – especially perhaps recalling Robert Rauschenberg’s iconic work Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). By extracting all text and photographic elements from the book covers, Einarsson’s compositions put us in mind of open window sections. With all other information removed the work reclaims an abstraction originally conceived in painting and repurposes it as painting again, filling the void left by the missing referents with a new meaning. Both artistic approaches create value by erasing something significant, thereby making space for new meaning.