These notes present some recent results concerning the convergence of solutions to the elliptic vectorial Allen-Cahn equation in dimension two as the parameter ε tends to zero, and its connections to minimal surface theory in the weak sense of stationary varifolds. We first describe the results obtained so far in the scalar theory, which can be considered as quite satisfactory, and provide some ideas about the proofs and their main steps. We then present some adaptations necessary to handle the vectorial case in dimension two.