Dilemma

Tibos Babos

Geminimal Collection

Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism

2023

60 x 50 cm (23.6 in x 19.6 in)

Oil on 3D+ Canvas

Budapest

In Private Collection

Dilemma is a distilled confrontation with the paradox of choice. Executed with calculated precision and conceptual boldness, the work belongs to Tibor Babos’s Geminimal collection and operates as a keystone in his practice of Paradox Constructivism—a style that subverts the rational language of geometric minimalism to reveal existential contradiction. Two impastoed squares—one a vivid salmon, the other a ghostly white—are suspended in silent opposition, joined and divided by a dark trapezoidal void. What first appears as a sharply constructed optical illusion unfolds into something far more metaphysical: an impossible object whose geometry stages the very condition of dilemma.

In Babos’s lexicon, the dilemma is not a failure of decision, but a moment of suspended multiplicity. As the artist himself notes, a dilemma is “a void of full potential”—a psychic terrain in which mutually exclusive realities momentarily coexist. Dilemma makes this moment tactile. The two squares are not simply visual elements, but symbolic agents. The pink, muscular form radiates immediacy, action, even carnality—its thick, expressive surface suggesting the charge of a realized act. Opposing it is the pale, brittle white: a form drained of temperature, flaked with entropy, embodying the ghost of paths not taken. Their separation is not just spatial but ontological—each outcome annihilates the other.

The diagonal trapezoid anchoring the composition is perhaps the painting’s most radical move. Rather than being rendered in pigment, it is exposed canvas—raw black, subtly disrupted by the chemical dispersions of turpentine blooms. This negative field becomes the active force of the painting: not a thing, but a thought. A dark bridge. A cognitive abyss. A logic gate through which neither decision can fully pass. The void is not absence—it is presence unchosen. It holds both outcomes in suspension and renders each one conditional on the collapse of the other.

The background, a silvery steel-gray built up over months of layered oil, serves as the neutral plane of potential—undecided, unaligned, almost metallic in its refusal of emotional heat. And yet, it shimmers with latent implication. It is from this surface that both squares rise and from which the shadow cuts—a stage upon which the impossible is performed with surgical clarity. The brushwork, while restrained, betrays no looseness. Each line is engineered; each edge hardened by temporal discipline. The painting took more than eighteen months to complete—its slow, layered construction echoing the psychic architecture of overthinking.

Formally, Dilemma nods to the lineages of Constructivism, Op Art, and Minimalism, but diverges from each in its refusal of closure. Where Ellsworth Kelly sought clarity through color and shape, Babos injects doubt. Where Albers harmonized interaction, Babos destabilizes it. The geometry here is not about order—it is about obstruction. The logic is not mathematical—it is psychological. The image does not rest; it hums.

In the context of Babos’s broader oeuvre, this painting is a conceptual high watermark. It advances the dialectics of War in Progress and Casus Belli, yet its conflict is not between powers, but within the self. It is not war, but hesitation. Not history, but cognition. And in this, Dilemma speaks to a distinctly modern affliction: the paralysis of choice in an age of infinite options. In a post-digital moment defined by overinformation and indecision, the painting stages the interior drama of a mind caught between too many truths.

Curatorially, Dilemma lends itself to a contemplative and tightly controlled installation. It requires precise lateral lighting to animate the impasto’s surface texture and to subtly reveal the discontinuity of the trapezoidal shadow. A minimal wall text, perhaps quoting the artist’s axiom—“The death of action is overthinking”—would deepen its interpretive field. Additional materials, such as sketches or time-lapse renderings of its production, could illuminate the slow violence of its construction. It is a painting that resists casual viewing. It asks not to be seen, but to be considered.

Ultimately, Dilemma is not a picture of a thought. It is a thought, materialized. It performs the standoff between equally compelling realities and refuses to collapse into narrative or solution. It is the rare artwork that doesn’t just depict the architecture of ambiguity—it is that architecture. Babos has constructed a shrine to hesitation, a monument to the suspended moment before choice, and in doing so, has given form to the most elusive of human conditions.