Binary

Tibor Babos

Geminimal Collection

Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism

2024

60 x 50 cm (23.6 x 19.6 in)

Oil on 3D+ Canvas

Budapest

In Private Collection

With Binary (2024), Tibor Babos crafts a crystalline meditation on duality, logic, and the illusions of perception. As a key work within the Geminimal collection, this painting distills Constructive Unrealism to its most elemental structure, reducing the language of opposition to a solitary visual riddle suspended in space. Two identical yet offset cubes emerge in sharp relief against a metallic brown field, their mirrored geometry suggesting symmetry, separation, and unresolved tension. The title Binary signals the theme outright: a visual and philosophical proposition that every unity is composed of opposing halves, and that perception itself is an act of contradiction.

At first glance, the composition appears direct—minimalist, even. But as the eye lingers, spatial instability begins to surface. The structure refuses to settle. Is it a single twisted prism or two stacked cubes? A solid form or a fragmented illusion? Babos deliberately withholds resolution, allowing multiple interpretations to flicker into and out of view. In doing so, he evokes the logic of paradox: a condition in which two apparently irreconcilable truths coexist. The resulting image is not a depiction of duality—it is duality, rendered in oil and space.

Chromatically, Binary operates with surgical restraint. Pale ice blue and deep cobalt articulate the three-dimensional illusion, while the metallic brown ground acts as both void and vessel—earthly, architectural, and strangely timeless. The brown base, composed through an intricate layering of gesso, black, and white underpainting before final application, shimmers subtly under light, evoking the sense of aged copper or brushed bronze. The blues, on the other hand, feel weightless—optical zones of clarity floating atop an ancient substrate. This chromatic opposition mirrors the painting’s conceptual one: a dialogue between grounded materiality and the abstract realm of thought.

Technically, Babos achieves the impossible within the traditionally fluid medium of oil. The edges are razor-sharp; the planes are flat, luminous, and controlled. No outlines are drawn—only intersections of color and geometry define form. The 3D+ canvas further enhances this architectural precision, allowing the structure to appear as though it floats above the surface, casting no shadow yet evoking mass. Viewed under directional lighting, the form seems to shift, hover, and breathe—a trick of light made possible only through Babos’s painstaking execution.

The brushwork, though nearly imperceptible, is key. Fine vertical strokes animate the planes, recalling the striation of brushed steel or weather-worn stone. This texture resists the sterility of machine-made perfection; it reminds the viewer that this is not an optical illusion conjured digitally, but a human-made object crafted through repetition, labor, and discipline. The contradiction between precision and imperfection becomes part of the painting’s deeper message: even binaries are porous. Even geometry contains doubt.

Philosophically, Binary continues Babos’s project of visual metaphysics. His Constructive Unrealism—rooted in the paradoxes of perception, form, and reality—finds here one of its purest expressions. The painting belongs not only to the lineage of Constructivism and Minimalism but also to a tradition of conceptual skepticism: the proposition that the most rigid systems are often the most fragile. It recalls Josef Albers in its color precision, Sol LeWitt in its logical structure, but diverges from both in its emotional and ontological ambition.

Contextually, Binary speaks to a cultural moment obsessed with polarization: binaries of code, ideology, identity. Yet Babos refuses the digital oversimplification of either/or logic. His binary is unstable, poetic, unresolved. The work invites the viewer to sit within contradiction—not to solve it, but to contemplate its shape.

From a curatorial standpoint, the painting offers rich possibilities. Its modest scale and monumental presence make it ideal for both intimate viewing and thematic exhibitions on perception, duality, or abstraction. Ideally shown in a quiet, shadow-controlled gallery space, the work rewards slowness and side-lighting, which reveals its layered depth and shifting geometry. It could anchor broader discussions of philosophical abstraction, or stand alone as a contemplative object that challenges the binary nature of truth itself.

Ultimately, Binary is not a work of resolution—it is a suspended question. In it, Babos merges technical mastery with conceptual rigor, producing a painting that is both visually serene and intellectually destabilizing. It asks: What is form, if not contradiction? What is certainty, if not illusion? And what happens when we allow both answers to be true at once?