Congruity
Tibor Babos
Geminimal Collection
Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism
2022
60 x 50 cm (23.6 in x 19.6 in)
Oil on 3D+ Canvas
Budapest
In Private Collection
Congruity (2022) by Tibor Babos is a meditation in restraint — a visual equation balancing contradiction with serenity. At once minimal and philosophical, this work from the Geminimal collection distills Babos’s practice to its clearest paradox: that clarity itself may be the most complex gesture of all. Beneath the seemingly austere composition lies an inquiry into the architecture of reconciliation — not compromise, but convergence.
Two mirrored prisms interlock without touching, suspended in a field of metallic grey. They suggest polarity, argument, even conflict — yet are arranged with such compositional poise that opposition becomes symmetry. Babos uses geometry not to separate, but to fuse. This is the crux of Congruity: the possibility that dualities — truth and falsehood, love and hate, structure and freedom — might inhabit a shared space without annihilating one another.
Rendered in a lucid turquoise against a muted grey background, the painting exudes a kind of visual diplomacy. The turquoise hovers in calm contrast, evoking clarity, trust, and a cool emotional distance. It floats atop a grey field that feels neither heavy nor light, but suspended — an ambient plane of neutrality, like thought before decision. Babos doesn’t saturate his surface with noise. He gives form the space to breathe, and meaning the silence to emerge.
There is movement here, though it’s subtle — a rotational logic that suggests the prisms are not fixed but caught mid-turn, their edges angled as if nudging toward alignment. This optical ambiguity is signature Babos: the flat canvas that implies depth, the still object that implies motion. Congruity doesn’t solve its own structure; it holds it in tension. The mind tries to fix the image into one perspective, but the image resists. This refusal is not frustrating — it’s contemplative.
The painting’s materiality reinforces its conceptual ambition. Executed in oil on 3D+ canvas, the work is precise but not sterile. The central forms are smooth, almost enamel-like in finish, while the metallic grey ground has a softly textured vertical grain, as if brushed by time. Light interacts differently with each surface: the turquoise refracts, the grey absorbs. The contrast between these two registers — the hard-edged form and the ambient void — creates a visual hum, a quiet vibration of opposites in dialogue.
Babos’s placement within the history of geometric abstraction is intentional, yet revisionist. He draws from Constructivism, Minimalism, Op Art — from Malevich’s purity, Albers’s chromatic logic, Vasarely’s optical systems — yet he infuses this lineage with a philosophical melancholy, a metaphysical undercurrent. In Congruity, abstraction becomes human again. The prisms are not merely forms; they are stand-ins for ideas, for people, for perspectives. And while each retains its integrity, their shared structure suggests a third space: a congruence neither side could reach alone.
Painted in 2022, at a moment of heightened global division, Congruity can be read as an act of quiet resistance. Against polarization, it offers synthesis. Against noise, silence. Against collapse, coherence. But it does not do so with idealism. The interlocking shapes don’t fuse into one; they remain distinct, defined. Babos does not ask us to erase difference, only to align it. Unity, in this vision, is not uniformity — it is balance.
As with all works in the Geminimal series, Congruity offers no narrative. It offers a proposition. It doesn’t show us the world, but how to think through it — abstractly, rigorously, tenderly. In a world that demands instant reaction, it asks for pause. In a culture obsessed with resolution, it holds the beauty of unresolved harmony.
