Six Blocks
Artist: Tibor Babos
Title: Six Blocks
Collection: David Star
Style: Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism
Year: 2023
Dimensions: 60 x 50 cm (23.6 x 19.6 in)
Medium: Oil on 3D+ Canvas
Location: Budapest
Copyright: © Tibor Babos
Collection Status: In Private Collection
Six Blocks (2023) by Tibor Babos is a study in orientation and disorientation — a geometric riddle that doubles as a psychological map. Composed of six interlocking prisms radiating in star-like formation, the work hovers between visual logic and spatial contradiction. At first glance, the structure feels ordered, even crystalline. But the longer one looks, the more the form begins to drift — forward and backward, in and out — as if pulled by the weight of unseen choices.
This is the core of the piece: not the star itself, but the sense of standing at its center. Babos has described this composition as a visual metaphor for the individual surrounded by unresolved possibilities. The blocks point in all directions, yet none offer clarity. This is not a moment of decision — it is the condition of decision-making. Each block becomes a projection of the self, a path imagined, taken, or deferred. And at the core of it all: uncertainty, rendered not as emptiness, but as a dense, purple fog.
Executed in oil on 3D+ canvas, Six Blocks occupies a liminal space between sculpture and painting. Its surfaces shift between coarse, textured panels and smooth, satin-like planes. The texture is deliberate — not decorative, but architectural. Some surfaces appear chiseled, others almost polished. On certain edges, the raw canvas peeks through, exposing technical drawing lines — a reminder that beneath every illusion lies structure, and beneath every structure, choice.
The color palette is restrained yet charged. A spectrum of purples — from deep violet to pale lavender — saturates the form, creating a slow rhythm across the composition. Purple, historically linked to introspection, ambiguity, and transformation, becomes a psychological atmosphere. There are no bold contrasts, no dramatic punctuation. Instead, the painting hums in half-tones — echoing the quiet confusion of modern decision fatigue, where every direction is both urgent and unclear.
While Six Blocks draws formal parallels to Constructivism and Op Art, it resists their rational detachment. Babos’s Constructive Unrealism is not interested in perfection or illusion for its own sake. Here, geometry is charged with emotional weight. The impossible structure doesn’t merely trick the eye — it mirrors the internal experience of navigating complexity with no fixed horizon. If Vasarely offered optical delight, Babos offers psychological tension.
Within the David Star collection, this work holds a central place — not as a religious symbol, but as a meditation on convergence and disarray. The star-like shape alludes to systems of order, to something sacred or ancient. Yet its logic collapses upon inspection, revealing not harmony but fragmentation. The painting doesn’t deny the possibility of alignment — it simply suggests that such alignment may not come from the outside. It must be reckoned with inwardly.
There is no resolution offered here. No path is privileged over another. The viewer is left to circle the form, both visually and conceptually, until what remains is not a single answer but a heightened awareness of the question. Six Blocks is less a painting to be decoded than a condition to be inhabited.
Presented in a controlled environment with directional lighting, the work reveals unexpected depth and shadow. The 3D+ canvas absorbs and reflects light differently across its surfaces, enhancing the illusion of movement and instability. In this way, the painting continues to shift — not only in space, but in meaning — depending on how it is approached.
Six Blocks is a quiet, complex achievement. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t resolve. It observes the architecture of uncertainty and renders it visible. In doing so, Babos doesn’t ask the viewer to choose. He asks them to stand still — at the center of contradiction — and look around.
Rubik's Cube
Artist: Tibor Babos
Title: Rubik’s Cube
Collection: Geminimal
Style: Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism
Year: 2024
Dimensions: 60 x 50 cm (23.6 x 19.6 in)
Medium: Oil on 3D+ Canvas
Location: Miami, FL
Copyright: © Tibor Babos
Collection Status: Exhibited at the BitBasel Gallery (Sagamore South Beach)
Rubik’s Cube (2024) by Tibor Babos, at first glance, seems deceptively playful — a floating structure of red and coral cubes suspended in an immaculate cyan void. But the longer one looks, the more the illusion fractures. Perspective collapses, shadows misalign, and the logic of the grid begins to betray itself. What appears to be a game turns out to be a trap. Tibor Babos’s Rubik’s Cube is not an homage to the popular Hungarian puzzle, but a ruthless meditation on systems that are built to resist resolution. It is a painting about intelligent constraint — the kind that challenges, frustrates, and shapes us in equal measure.
This piece poses a fundamental question, central to the Constructive Unrealism movement:
How do you solve something that is structured to resist?
That question is not only mathematical or optical — it is political, personal, existential. The cubes interlock with engineered precision, but their configuration defeats spatial logic. This paradox is no accident. Babos builds a visual language of impossibility to mirror the ideological systems we inhabit — structures that present themselves as neutral or solvable, but which in fact perpetuate confusion, repetition, and strategic dead-ends.
Formally, the painting is built on a recursive geometry. A series of isometric cubes nest and hinge into one another, climbing diagonally across the canvas like a chain of decisions or institutional hierarchies. The alignment is seductive but misleading. The viewer tries to follow one path through the structure only to find another jutting through it, violating depth and collapsing distance. This distortion is deliberate. It replicates the psychological experience of navigating bureaucracy, political identity, or even modern life: the sensation of being inside a system that obeys its own obscure internal logic.
The color palette sharpens the paradox. The background — a luminous, even antiseptic turquoise — serves as the illusion of clarity, optimism, or neutrality. It evokes the promise of resolution. But the structure it holds — loud red blocks bordered in dark, nearly black outlines — delivers a counterpunch. These reds are not soft or celebratory; they are coded with urgency, conflict, even aggression. The contrast is startling. The image shimmers with contradiction: it is simultaneously sterile and brutal, joyful and entrapping.
Babos’s technique enforces this duality. The surface is highly textural — rough, almost scarred in the red areas — while the background remains smooth and cool. This tactile imbalance emphasizes the conceptual one. The painterly grain within each cube face mimics organic material: flesh, stone, or scar tissue. These are not weightless forms. They carry the burden of mass and memory. The texture resists the eye’s desire to flatten the image. It demands recognition — of complexity, of friction, of error.
Positioned within the Geminimal collection, Rubik’s Cube operates at the center of Babos’s exploration of duality and mirrored contradiction. But here, unlike in Congruity or Opposite Parallels, the oppositional forces do not harmonize — they entrap. There is no synthesis, only repetition. This painting is less about reconciling differences and more about enduring them. It reflects the cognitive strain of trying to “solve” problems that are structurally unsolvable — whether in politics, identity, or ethics.
Symbolically, the Rubik’s Cube holds special meaning. Invented in Hungary during the Cold War, it was both a feat of design and an ideological export — a complex riddle disguised as play. Babos reclaims that symbolism here, stripping it of nostalgia and revealing its deeper metaphor: a system whose very elegance masks its resistance to being decoded. In this light, the cube becomes a metaphor for any closed logic that refuses input, deflects empathy, and rewards only those who memorize its mechanics.
Curatorially, Rubik’s Cube holds a unique position. It is accessible, instantly recognizable in its form, yet ultimately disorienting. It draws the viewer in through familiarity, then slowly destabilizes perception. This makes it an ideal centerpiece in exhibitions about illusion, cognition, and political structure. Its visual impact is amplified by spotlighting that reveals the depth of the painted texture, allowing the viewer to engage not just optically, but almost physically with the painting’s contradictions.
Tibor Babos has constructed not a puzzle, but a warning. Rubik’s Cube does not offer a solution. It offers the architecture of a problem — beautiful, intricate, and unwilling to yield. It reminds us that the most dangerous systems are not the ones we fear, but the ones we accept as given. And sometimes, the hardest thing to see is not what’s broken — but what is designed not to work.
Forever Blue
Artist: Tibor Babos
Title: Forever Blue
Collection: Everest
Style: Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism
Year: 2024
Dimensions: 60 x 50 cm (23.6 x 19.6 in)
Medium: Oil on 3D+ Canvas
Location: Budapest
Copyright: © Tibor Babos, All Rights Reserved
Collection Status: In Private Collection
Forever Blue (2024) by Tibor Babos unfolds as a philosophical meditation rendered through geometric restraint and emotional depth. Part of the Everest Collection, this work stands as both monument and mystery: an object of clarity that refuses resolution. Within the visual grammar of Constructive Unrealism and its offshoot, Paradox Constructivism, Babos offers not merely a painting but a metaphysical proposition — a structure that dares to speak of the infinite through the finite, of silence through form.
At first glance, the central shape appears simple: two angular, ribbon-like hexagons, folded into a mirrored dialogue. Yet within this minimalism lies a deliberate complexity. The form echoes the Möbius strip, the lemniscate, or even wave-particle duality—symbols of recursion, duality, and ungraspable totality. But Babos breaks the loop. The illusion of endlessness is severed. These are fragments of infinity, stilled in time, made comprehensible only through rupture. It is a geometry of longing: precision tinged with absence.
Painted in oil on 3D+ canvas, the piece rejects the illusionistic flatness of screen culture. Its surface is thick, deliberate, physical. The impasto technique lends each angle of the blue form a kind of muscularity, as though the paint itself strains to contain what cannot be seen. The texture roughens the digital-like precision of the form, injecting humanity into an otherwise machine-like silhouette. The work resists immateriality; it insists on being touched, held, remembered.
Color becomes the emotional weather of the piece. The background is a black so deep it veers toward outer space — not symbolic black, but cosmological. It is the abyss: unknowable, absolute. Against this, the central structure shifts through gradients of cold ultramarine, sapphire, cobalt, and flickering turquoise. These blues do not soothe; they ache. They shimmer with melancholic light, like thoughts caught between logic and feeling. Babos’s blue is not merely a hue — it is a state of being, an existential atmosphere. It carries the sorrow of knowing that knowing is incomplete.
And yet, for all its stillness, Forever Blue hums with contemporary urgency. In an age of artificial intelligence and mathematical formalism, where algorithms promise mastery over information but deliver no wisdom, Babos constructs a formal system that refuses total explanation. It looks computational — clean, modular, modularly rotated — yet resists codification. The painting is almost a diagram of consciousness: structured, recursive, and flawed. In doing so, it critiques the false precision of digital aesthetics, injecting doubt where the machine offers certainty.
The paradox Babos evokes is not merely visual — it is ontological. The form is complete yet broken, infinite yet finite, serene yet unsettled. It speaks to the spiritual disorientation of a species that maps galaxies but cannot map its own purpose. In this way, Forever Blue resonates with a lineage of thinkers and makers—from Kazimir Malevich’s cosmic reductionism to Donald Judd’s silent volumes—but Babos diverges by embedding vulnerability into structure. His geometry is not cold. It trembles with feeling.
Ultimately, Forever Blue is not a statement but a question—elegant, aching, unresolved. It asks what it means to inhabit a world of patterns while yearning for meaning beyond them. What does it mean to loop and loop and never arrive? It is a work of paradoxical clarity, a monument to the limits of comprehension, and a testament to the enduring human desire to render the infinite — even if imperfectly — in paint.
The Russian-Ukrainian War
Artist: Tibor Babos
Title: The Russian-Ukrainian War
Collection: War
Style: Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism
Year: 2025
Dimensions: 60 x 50 cm (23.6 in X 19.6 in)
Medium: Oil on 3D+ Canvas
Location: Budapest
Copyright: © Tibor Babos, All Rights Reserved
The Russian-Ukrainian War (2025) by Tibor Babos is a stripped-down geometry of grief and force — a composition that speaks the unspeakable through silence, through form. As part of the War Collection, the painting transforms abstraction into confrontation, turning the legacy of Constructivism on its head. Here, Babos’s Paradox Constructivism operates with brutal clarity, combining the visual language of utopian modernism with the lived trauma of contemporary geopolitics.
The composition is deceptively clean: a sharp white diagonal slices across a field of deep, bruised blue. Anchored to this diagonal are two heavy squares — one red, one yellow — positioned like oppositional sentinels in a cold, formal standoff. Yet within this hard geometry lies a battlefield. The red square bleeds quietly into the canvas, textured with layers of aggression, ideology, and decay. It is the aggressor — Russia — rendered not as emblem but as weight. Above the white band, it looms. Below, the yellow square hums with battered brightness, scarred but electric. It stands for Ukraine — not in triumph, but in endurance.
Babos’s manipulation of surface is as political as it is painterly. Each square is not merely colored, but carved and wounded. The oil is dragged, scraped, heaped — a technique that turns pigment into terrain. The red is not a clean hue; it is a corrupted one, textured like history. The yellow is not hopeful; it is trembling, vivid, necessary. The blue swath that cradles and crushes the composition is heavy with impasto, like night sky pocked with explosions. This is a map made of memory and oil.
The white diagonal — perhaps the most ambiguous and evocative element — slices through this field like both a border and a blade. It could be a path, or a wound. It evokes clarity but offers no comfort. It is neither neutral nor passive; it forces separation, draws opposition, defines the very geometry of war. It introduces rhythm into stasis, direction into confrontation. Its very starkness carries unease.
Color, for Babos, is never innocent. Red, yellow, blue, and white — these are the components of national flags, systems of belonging, structures of pride. But here, they’re stripped of triumph. They don’t wave; they weigh. They compress. The chromatic language becomes a cipher of power and suffering, of aggression and defense, of a world where symbols kill and survive.
This work operates on two registers at once: one visual, one visceral. On the surface, it recalls the coolness of Malevich or El Lissitzky — echoes of Suprematism and Constructivism in the rigid spatial order. But Babos ruptures that lineage. He refuses the utopian aspirations of early abstraction, injecting it instead with dread, specificity, and pain. This is not the geometry of progress. It is the geometry of collapse.
Created amid an ongoing and unresolved war, The Russian-Ukrainian War becomes both document and demand. It does not narrate or explain; it insists. Its minimalism is not aesthetic detachment, but sharpened focus. In an era of overexposed images and numbed attention, Babos reduces the war to its primal forms and elemental consequences. This abstraction doesn’t escape reality — it heightens it.
As with all of Babos’s Constructive Unrealism, the contradiction is the point. Clean forms, chaotic implications. Beautiful surfaces, brutal meaning. The painting becomes a paradox in paint: ordered and disrupted, symbolic and searing. It offers no resolution, only the task of reflection. It refuses to let the viewer look away.
The Russian-Ukrainian War is a landmark in Babos’s ongoing inquiry into the ethics of form and the politics of abstraction. It is not a protest, not a sermon, not a spectacle. It is a wound given structure, a silence given geometry. In this sense, it is one of the most urgent functions art can serve — to reframe crisis not as an image, but as an experience.
Opposite Parallels
Artist: Tibor Babos
Title: Opposite Parallels
Collection: Geminimal
Style: Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism
Year: 2024
Dimensions: 60 x 50 cm (23.6 in X 19.6 in)
Medium: Oil on 3D+ Canvas
Location: Budapest
Copyright: © Tibor Babos, All Rights Reserved
Collection Status: In Private Collection
Opposite Parallels (2024) by Tibor Babos is a visual proposition that reads less like a painting and more like a dimensional theorem. Anchored in the conceptual foundations of Paradox Constructivism, Babos’s signature sub-discipline within Constructive Unrealism, this work offers a crystalline meditation on simultaneity, contradiction, and metaphysical displacement. The title alone — Opposite Parallels — initiates a paradox, collapsing the boundary between logic and poetry. It hints at a system where dualities coexist without resolution, where form doesn’t reveal truth but deepens its obscurity.
At the center of the composition, six rhomboid prisms — angular, blue-black, and seamed in textured white — stand aligned yet misaligned, parallel yet adversarial. They appear to move in two directions at once, held in magnetic repulsion. The structure suggests mirrored sequences: timelines diverging while visually harmonized, entities locked in symmetrical opposition. The very geometry of the work subverts Euclidean comfort, introducing a logic of estrangement. These are not forms that meet. They orbit each other in suspended detachment, echoing the fundamental tragedy of parallelism — that which runs beside can never converge.
Babos renders this contradiction not only through composition but through material resistance. The prism interiors are worked with heavy, almost geological oil layers, coarse and blackened in texture. These fields feel carved, not painted — like tectonic surfaces marked by unseen pressures. Against this ruggedness, the outlines are edged in chalky, light-toned relief, textured but clean, luminous like boundaries between perception and event. These outlines do not contain the form; they fracture it. They function as apertures through which another dimensional logic briefly flickers.
The grey background is smooth, nearly atmospheric, a void without anchoring reference. This is not a background in the traditional sense — it is conceptual space. It holds the forms like a question holds a thought: suspended, unsettled, unresolved. Its neutrality is illusory. Subtle gradations and tonal shifts within the grey suggest both depth and emptiness, like an environment caught between states of matter, or the visual equivalent of uncollapsed probability.
Color plays an epistemological role. The ultramarine-black interior of each prism evokes not only cosmic depth, but psychic depth — dense, unknowable, and vast. This is a color of concealment and reverence, invoking something sacred within the structural. The faint blues that emerge at certain angles feel like memory leaking through form. And the luminous white edgework becomes an active paradox: sharp yet soft, declarative yet unstable. It hints at contact points — brief alignments between opposites — before vanishing back into separation.
The painting’s 3D+ canvas furthers the illusion of dimensional fluctuation. Depending on the viewer’s position and the light’s angle, the work shifts — its surfaces expand and contract, its shadows realign. This is not a static object but an optical field. It resists final interpretation because it is built from the premise that understanding, like reality, is always partial. Even the scarring on the surface, the incidental scratches and interruptions, feel like intrusions from parallel timelines — aesthetic bleed-throughs from other versions of the same painting.
Opposite Parallels arrives in a moment where certainty is no longer available — culturally, politically, cosmologically. It speaks to a world fractured by simultaneity: multiple truths, conflicting timelines, recursive futures. In such a landscape, Babos does not seek to impose order. He reclaims geometry as a vessel for doubt. The painting becomes a visual lexicon for the ungraspable — not to answer the metaphysical question, but to formulate it in a new language of contradiction and tension.
This is a work that contemplates the physics of perception. It renders space not as a setting, but as a metaphysical challenge. It uses texture as an argument. It enacts philosophy through structure. Babos has produced not just a painting, but a proposition — one that reverberates far beyond its frame. Opposite Parallels doesn’t illustrate an idea. It is the idea, made tactile, made visible, and — crucially — made uncertain.
Proaggressive
Artist: Tibor Babos
Title: Proaggressive
Collection: War
Style: Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism
Year: 2025
Dimensions: 60 x 50 cm (23.6 in X 19.6 in)
Medium: Oil on 3D+ Canvas
Location: Budapest
Copyright: © Tibor Babos, All Rights Reserved
Proaggressive (2025) by Tibor Babos emerges as a visual cipher for the contradictions encoded in contemporary progress. Its title alone—a collision of “progressive” and “aggressive,” amplified by the doubled “G”—suggests a trajectory where advancement is no longer neutral or benevolent, but inherently combative. Set against a blood-saturated background, the painting becomes both a psychological map and a structural allegory for escalation—personal, societal, technological. Babos positions this work within his “War Collection,” yet its definition of war transcends military confrontation. This is about ideological warfare, ecological brinkmanship, algorithmic acceleration, and the silent architecture of domination that parades as development.
The form at the center—a recursive, paradoxical staircase of cubic limbs—refuses spatial coherence. It evokes the rigorous logic of Constructivism but destabilizes it through impossible geometry. The object folds into itself, ascending and collapsing in the same breath, as though ambition itself were corrupted at the blueprint stage. Babos calls this “Paradox Constructivism,” and here it operates as both critique and incantation: the more structured our systems become, the less decipherable their logic. What seems like rational growth morphs into architectural delirium, an empire of steps that lead nowhere but onward.
Executed in oil on 3D+ canvas, the work refuses illusionism. The paint is physical, deliberate, and dense—more terrain than surface. Babos manipulates the oil with a brutality that echoes the work’s ideological undercurrents: dragging, layering, and abrading the pigment until the image itself seems wounded. The structure at the center, outlined in cold blacks and steely golds, suggests something industrial and militarized—metallic, scorched, and unclean. These are not the polished symbols of utopia; they are the eroded bones of a system designed to endure conflict, not peace.
Color operates with almost heraldic precision. The red background is not symbolic in the lazy sense—it bleeds, pulses, scratches at the eye. It is blood and revolution, alarm and aftermath. Black anchors the geometry with authoritarian weight, while the restrained gold glints with imperial suggestion. Together they form a triadic language of power: violence, control, and capital. Babos does not shout this symbolism; he builds it into the visual logic of the painting, allowing meaning to radiate from the structure rather than sit upon it.
Texture plays a vital role in the piece’s impact. The canvas is anything but smooth; it is fractured, crusted, scarred. This is the opposite of digital clarity—it is insistently human, insistently flawed. In an era where images are endlessly manipulated and optimized, Babos’s refusal to conceal labor becomes a form of resistance. The texture here is not decorative but forensic. It suggests decay, entropy, the trace evidence of unseen systems at work—geopolitical, technological, psychological.
What makes Proaggressive so piercing in our present moment is its quiet indictment of the systems we inhabit. As AI, surveillance, and automated governance reshape our world, the illusion of progress has become self-replicating and opaque. Babos’s impossible staircase becomes a metaphor for these systems—seductive in form, dizzying in execution, and ultimately without exit. He does not offer clarity or consolation. Instead, he presents the algorithm as artifact, a relic of a world still pretending it knows where it’s going.
This is not just a painting. It is a philosophical terrain rendered in oil and contradiction. It invites the viewer not to solve its riddle but to dwell inside it—to feel the friction between beauty and violence, logic and madness, control and collapse. Proaggressive stands as a key node in Babos’s Constructive Unrealism: a movement defined by structure undone, clarity defied, and meaning sharpened by paradox.
Intelligence
Artist: Tibor Babos
Title: Intelligence
Collection: War
Style: Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism
Year: 2024
Dimensions: 60 x 50 cm (23.6 in x 19.6 in)
Medium: Oil on 3D+ Canvas
Location: Budapest
Copyright: © Tibor Babos, All Rights Reserved
Collection Status: In Private Collection
Intelligence (2024) by Tibor Babos is a quiet blade. Cold, composed, and exacting, it cuts into the invisible architecture of contemporary power without ever raising its voice. Part of the War Collection, this painting doesn’t depict conflict as explosion or rupture, but as silence—surgical, networked, disembodied. In the realm of Constructive Unrealism, and more specifically Babos’s Paradox Constructivism, this work becomes a cipher: formal, controlled, and charged with the specter of the unseen.
The composition centers around an impossible object—an angular, six-pronged blue structure, floating in stark isolation against a fractured white ground. Its symmetry is seductive, but misleading. At first glance, the form appears stable, balanced, rational. But the longer one looks, the more it resists legibility. Perspective frays. Logic distorts. The object seems to reach out in every direction, then fold back into itself—a recursive geometry with no center. This is intelligence not as knowledge, but as architecture: covert, coded, ungraspable.
Babos uses this form to evoke the global surveillance systems that frame modern life. Each “arm” of the shape could be a signal, a satellite, a channel of information — deployed and withdrawn at will. It is both map and mechanism. Yet the structure offers no access point; it only observes. It is an allegory for power that moves without visibility, for wars fought not with tanks but with data, deception, and delay.
Executed in oil on 3D+ canvas, the materiality of Intelligence is critical. Babos uses paint as a contradiction — clean edges meet corrupted interiors. The ultramarine blue is both radiant and eroded, as if the very pigment were decaying beneath the surface. In some areas, the oil is smooth and polished; in others, scratched and wounded. These abrasions do not disrupt the form’s authority — they reveal its cost. Every illusion of order is paid for in erosion. Every empire of secrets bears its own scars.
The white background is anything but blank. It is fissured, marked, pocked with imperfections. This is not purity, but compromised neutrality — the myth of objectivity in an age of influence. The ‘white’ pretends to be passive, but its surface buzzes with encoded traces: smudges, indentations, whispered betrayals. What isn’t painted becomes part of the message. What isn’t said becomes the subject.
Color in Intelligence functions not as emotion, but encryption. Blue dominates, not as melancholy but as logic—cold, systemic, institutional. It is the color of uniforms, algorithms, encrypted servers. It connotes control. Yet within this blue are fractures, infections of black and absence. The structure, like the institutions it reflects, is breaking beneath the weight of its own certainty.
There is no drama in Intelligence. No gesture. No outcry. And this is what makes it so disturbing. It captures the essence of a geopolitical moment where power no longer announces itself—it embeds. In democracies infiltrated, elections manipulated, and conflicts sparked in silence, this painting becomes a document of how control now operates: not through spectacle, but through structure.
Babos offers no resolution. He does not moralize or sentimentalize. Instead, he stages the impossibility of seeing clearly in an era designed to obscure. Intelligence becomes the art of disorientation — not to confuse, but to mirror the reality we inhabit. Its contradictions are not flaws; they are method.
The painting does not ask to be understood. It asks to be questioned. It does not invite the viewer into a narrative. It installs the viewer inside a system. Its form watches back.
This is the genius of Babos’s Constructive Unrealism: the ability to render paradox not as a trick of the eye, but as the condition of our time. In Intelligence, the war is not fought on the canvas — the canvas is the war. The battlefield is geometry. The weapon is ambiguity. And the victory is neither declared nor visible.
Casus Belli
Artist: Tibor Babos
Title: Casus Belli
Collection: War
Style: Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism
Year: 2024
Dimensions: 60 x 50 cm (23.6 x 19.6 in)
Medium: Oil on 3D+ Canvas
Location: Budapest
Copyright: © Tibor Babos, All Rights Reserved
Collection Status: In Private Collection
Casus Belli (2024) by Tibor Babos is not a painting of war — it is war, coded into geometry. With this piece, the artist confronts the viewer with the architecture of conflict: its premeditation, its choreography, and its moral absurdity. Stripped of spectacle, stripped of narrative, the work presents violence as a system. Aestheticized not to distance, but to reveal.
The composition is stark, divided with almost militaristic precision. Rectangles and slanted parallelograms interlock across the canvas like compartments in a tactical map or the cells of a war room schematic. Each form is confined, each plane isolated by sharp white borders. There is no chaos here — only calculation. The aggression is not emotional but structural. Babos’s grid becomes a metaphor for how ideology is segmented, weaponized, and deployed. The painting operates as a machine, impassive in its violence, dispassionate in its design.
Diagonal thrusts dominate the center of the canvas — harsh, black-red parallelograms flanking a central rupture. These are not gentle compositional elements; they cut. They mimic the incursion of force, of territory breached, of weapons crossing lines. The entire canvas feels like a warning system — a visual siren. The forms do not rest. They press forward. The very geometry suggests forward momentum, a logic of escalation.
But Babos’s restraint is what lends the work its power. No explosions. No figures. Just three colors: red, black, and white. Each is deliberately corrupted. The black is thick, suffocating — a visual analog to industrial machinery, to armored steel, to the opacity of military command. The red is wounded, scraped, violently alive — the surface flayed with pigment, echoing blood, propaganda, panic. And the white — perhaps the most damning — is no longer clean. It is marred, smeared, bruised. This is not the white of peace or surrender. This is the white of plausible deniability. The white of silence.
Surface matters here more than ever. The 3D+ canvas creates depth without illusion. Each panel feels like a slab. A wall. A command. The texture of the oil is physical, nearly geological — dragged, carved, pitted. These marks read as scars: bureaucratic decisions rendered in pigment. The work feels constructed and wounded at once, as if the act of painting it replicated the psychological mechanics of war itself — repetitive, procedural, dehumanized.
Babos’s own background — military strategist turned artist — casts a long shadow across Casus Belli. He does not approach the theme from outside. He has studied its systems, internalized its logic, and now re-engineers it into visual critique. This is not protest art. It is diagnostic. It shows how war is made: how it is framed, rationalized, sold. The painting’s title — Casus Belli, the justification for conflict — is rendered here not as text, but as a modular schema. It reminds us that wars begin not with gunfire, but with justification. With diagrams. With abstractions.
And that is perhaps the most haunting aspect of the work. It implicates abstraction itself. These forms, so clean, so organized, are not innocent. They become accomplices. The painting resists the easy binary of figuration versus non-figuration. Babos reveals that abstraction, like policy, like rhetoric, can be mobilized for destruction. The canvas is no longer a space of contemplation. It is a site of complicity.
Casus Belli is unflinching. It does not offer catharsis. It does not mourn. It observes, indicts, and remains. The viewer is not asked to sympathize, but to recognize. To see how simple it is to make something terrible seem organized. To understand that war, in its modern form, is not spontaneous combustion — it is design.
Babos, through the lens of Paradox Constructivism, collapses the boundary between aesthetic form and ethical content. He uses order to speak of disorder. He uses control to expose cruelty. Casus Belli is not an image of what war does. It is a portrait of how war is conceived — with straight lines, calculated angles, and colors chosen not for feeling, but for effect.
In this way, the painting becomes a curatorial imperative. It must be seen not only as an artwork, but as a cultural artifact — one that exposes the violence behind abstraction, the silence behind strategy, and the consequences behind clean design. It demands attention not for its beauty, but for its truth. And once seen, it cannot be unseen.
Congruity
Artist: Tibor Babos
Title: Congruity
Collection: Geminimal
Style: Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism
Year: 2022
Dimensions: 60 x 50 cm (23.6 in x 19.6 in)
Medium: Oil on 3D+ Canvas
Location: Budapest
Copyright: © Tibor Babos, All Rights Reserved
Collection Status: 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.