For his contribution to the 2007 exhibition catalogue, Troubling Abstraction: Robert Houle, Mark A. Cheetham discusses the present print as an early example of Houle’s drawing on the lessons of Western art practices. In particular, Diamond Composition is compared to Mondrian’s preoccupation with the rational manipulation of geometric forms to create the “dynamic equilibrium.” By drawing on Mondrian’s “lozenge” or diamond shaped works, as well as the Dutch artist’s attempts to depict a painted surface that describes the individuality of the infinite components of the universe, in Diamond Composition, we see a De Stijl-like set of interlocking, asymmetrical shapes that are remarkable for their sense of harmony.

However, in his purposeful interaction with his predecessors of abstract art, Houle deliberately disrupts the “purity” associated with Neoplasticism. At close inspection, many of the facets of Diamond Composition are what Cheetham describes as “insistent, four-stroke groupings of lines” that would “unsettle the careful surfaces of a Mondrian, at least visually.” This subversive tactic, according to Cheetham, signals Houle’s “part in the turn towards a recognition of discrepant practices within Modernism[. T]hose initiated by non-canonical practitioners and from officially peripheral places.”

These complexes of crosshatched marks are not simply a subversion of the order and tone of Neoplasticism “set down only for tonal and surface effect.” Cheetham succinctly describes their inclusion,

“These strokes are intimations of porcupine quills — as well as memories of the parallel painted lines of 18th-century Innu garments and the linear indentations on ancient Iroquoian pottery — traces of commodities and techniques central to the decorative traditions of First Nations cultures. The quills prick our memories of a threatened past, a history with which Houle 'infects' abstraction. Houle’s strokes extend well beyond the surface to proclaim that abstraction can speak for history, his history.”