Intelligence

Tibor Babos

War Collection

Paradox Constructivism / Constructive Unrealism

2024

60 x 50 cm (23.6 in x 19.6 in)

Oil on 3D+ Canvas

Budapest

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 Each “arm” of the shape could be a signal, a satellite, a channel of information — deployed and withdrawn at will.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.