Sub-Rosa XII. Variante is a large-format Chinese ink drawing created in 1977, acquired by Sempere at the Theo Gallery in Madrid at the end of that same year. The work was exhibited at the Maeght galleries in Barcelona and Madrid in 1977.

The Sub-Rosa series, of which the museum preserves this piece numbered XII and titled Variante, is composed of large-format drawings in which Palazuelo explores the same family of forms: polygons with truncated angles and organic contours that enclose themselves concentrically, like topographic maps or crystalline structures viewed from above. In this Variante, two nuclei of equidistant lines articulate and touch each other, generating a double figure that has something of an anatomical section and something of impossible architecture. The lines are precise, continuous, drawn with a certainty that admits no correction. There is no color, no shadow: only the black stroke on raw paper and the space it organizes. Palazuelo described this series as the culmination of a process in which pure drawing was "essential language," capable of revealing the architectural identity of forms without any other resource, a technique to which he grants the same importance as any of his great oils.

Pablo Palazuelo was one of the central figures of Spanish art in the second half of the twentieth century. He developed his abstract language during his twenty years in Paris where Sempere met him, sharing from then on the same plastic interests and a great mutual admiration that this piece in the collection demonstrates.