There is a category of works at the Abode of Chaos that is easily misunderstood if one tries to read them as one would the walls of a conventional museum: the portraits.

They are everywhere.

Heads of state, revolutionaries, scientists, artists, strategists, thinkers, dissidents, architects of power, visible or subterranean actors in History. Some are immediately recognizable. Others reveal themselves only to those who already know the event, doctrine, war, network, or fracture of which they formed a node.

But these portraits do not constitute a pantheon. Nor are they a ranking. Above all, they are not a tribunal.

To digitally paint the portrait of a man or a woman at the Abode of Chaos means neither honoring them, absolving them, accusing them, nor endorsing what they represent. That is precisely the confusion I want to avoid.

I do not paint an opinion.

I digitally paint a presence in world History across the centuries.

I am therefore not merely a portraitist. The term that perhaps best describes this work would be that of a digital meta-portraitist. The face is first selected, analyzed, and digitally recoded. But the portrait does not end with that image. It enters into an architecture of relationships: with other faces, events, doctrines, wars, networks of power, and temporalities that may not become legible until years later.

The visible portrait is the result of five, ten, sometimes twenty years of observing a woman or a man. I try to enter the deepest reaches of their psyche, stripping away the trappings of their power. Then comes a precise moment that belongs to me alone: the imperative need to invite them onto the walls of the Abode of Chaos. At that moment, the portrait haunts me. I only recover my breath when, in the digital archives of the Internet, I discover the photograph or engraving that embodies the deep psyche I already carry within me. Then comes relief, followed by a second trial by fire: where should this portrait be placed within this network of invisible threads? With whom will it be able to enter into dialogue? Thus is born the Carte du Tendre of the Abode of Chaos, which neither Deleuze nor Guattari would disavow. An open rhizome of intensities, lines of flight, and shifting desires between power, destruction, and knowledge. It is the point of entry into a vast labyrinth where the rhizomes of my brain constantly organize these silent labels. Some visitors sense these invisible relationships. It fills me with joy to know that there are kindred spirits capable of reading, outside time and outside the system, this de-captioned History of the world.

The portrait thus becomes part of a larger system. I do not digitally paint a face in order to isolate it. I inscribe it within a human, political, and philosophical cartography whose relationships are themselves part of the work.

For years, I have sometimes chosen a face even before History has finished revealing why that face will matter. I had already expressed this differently: I create and codify portraits that I sense may belong to a future History.

The important word is future.

This is not prophecy. I do not claim to know what will happen. It is a particular attentiveness to the lines of force within the present, to those places where something is concentrating before it has even received its definitive name.

Giorgio Agamben defines the contemporary as one who is capable of receiving the dark beam of his own time.

That definition of the contemporary has long accompanied my conception of the artist.

The artist is not merely the one who looks at what his time illuminates.

He is also the one who takes the full force of its beam of darkness.

Sometimes he sees a fracture before it has become a narrative. He identifies a face before it has become an icon. He senses a tension before it has become war, collapse, revolution, doctrine, scandal, or geopolitical rupture. He does not necessarily know what that tension will produce. But he knows it is there. It is in that space that I bring the portraits of the Abode of Chaos into being.

They await History.

Some for a few weeks.

Others for years.

Some may remain obscure for a very long time. That does not trouble me. A work has no obligation to provide its operating instructions immediately.

This is precisely where what I call the silent labels come into play. In a traditional museum, the label reassures. It provides a name, a date, a medium, sometimes a few lines of interpretation. It tells the viewer in which direction to begin looking.

At the Abode of Chaos, I have often chosen the opposite movement.

I may provide a name, a date, document an event and, in my books, supply the historical material needed to understand a period.

But I do not necessarily reveal the connection that led me to the portrait.

I do not always provide the hypothesis. I do not always provide the causality. I do not reveal the hidden connection.

This silence is not an absence of thought. On the contrary, it is the result of thought.

I know why the face is there.

I know which other face, event, rupture, or architecture of power it resonates with. But I am under no obligation to write that relational algorithm on the wall.

The silent label begins at precisely that point.

It removes the prepared answer from the viewer.

It gives the problem back to them.

A photograph accompanied by its caption almost immediately forms a unit of meaning. The eye looks at the image, but the mind has already received its instruction. It knows what it is supposed to see.

The place, the date, the protagonist, the victim, the person responsible, the victory, the defeat, the catastrophe: the caption assigns the roles.

At the Abode of Chaos, I wanted to break with this odious mechanism of the mainstream media.

The image remains. The caption withdraws.

And when the caption withdraws, something strange happens: the viewer has to begin looking again.

Recognition is no longer enough. The viewer must search, compare, call upon memory, sometimes accept not understanding.

It is this suspension that interests me. It is the opposite of the instantaneous consumption of information.

Our age produces billions of images and, paradoxically, gives each of them less and less time.

A photograph appears, immediately titled, captioned, commented upon, shared, then covered by another and forgotten. The Abode of Chaos performs the opposite movement: it extracts certain images from the flow, tears them away from their swiftness, enlarges them, paints them, and engraves them into its material substance through a mise en abyme that resonates in my mind and gives meaning to the hidden side of History.

It can preserve them for twenty years, thirty years, or longer still. What was destined to receive only a few seconds of attention enters another temporality.

History can begin its work.

That is why the arrangement of the portraits is no more innocent than their selection.

Proximity is a syntax.

Distance is too.

Two faces placed within the same field may belong to different continents, opposing ideologies, generations that never encountered one another.

And yet something connects them.

It may be a raw material, a war, a doctrine, a financial system, a technology, a religion, a border, intelligence, a revolution, a chain of decisions, or the same consequence produced thousands of miles apart.

The visitor may see the portrait. They do not necessarily possess the connection. That is deliberate.

The Abode of Chaos is not composed solely of works. It is composed of relationships between works. And not all of those relationships are written down. This is probably one of the deepest differences between an inventory and a Total Work of Art.

An inventory can list what exists.

It cannot necessarily restore what circulates between things.

And what has always interested me is precisely what circulates.

Between one datum and another.

Between an event and its consequence.

Between a raw material and a war.

Between a legal decision and an economic transformation.

Between a photograph and the caption imposed upon it.

Between a face painted today and the History that, ten years from now, may suddenly cast it into a new light.

The geopolitics of the Abode of Chaos should therefore be read neither as an atlas nor as an illustrated chronology of contemporary conflicts, still less as a collection of political opinions materialized on walls. It is the subjective, de-captioned iconography of a news agency.

It is a cartography of power dynamics.

Madrid, London, Paris, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Near and Middle East, asymmetric wars, straits, empires, religions, raw materials, borders, and technologies are not separate files.

They form a complex system, invisible to many of us.

The portraits are its human nodes. Some become famous. Some disappear. Some change function. Some become iconic and henceforth belong to humanity.

Some move, within the space of a few years, from ally to enemy, from marginal figure to leader, from theorist to actor, from an almost unknown man to a face recognized across the world.

The painting remains.

And it is precisely this permanence that sometimes allows a portrait to change meaning without a single additional brushstroke.

History then rewrites the silent label.

That is why I distrust retrospective explanations that would suggest that, at the moment I chose a face, I already knew everything that would follow. That would be false.

I knew the point of tension, not necessarily what it would become.

The contemporary works within that interval. He receives the signal before knowing the whole sentence. Then time writes what comes next.

The portrait I create is therefore less a conclusion than a hypothesis left physically open. For the portraits of the Abode of Chaos, it is always in a state of intellectual correspondence with the subject that I choose the form, the movement, the material, the medium, the imprint, and the confidential background.

It waits.

It resists oblivion.

It remains available for an event that may not yet have occurred.

And when that event comes, the visitor who returns a few years later is no longer looking at the same work.

The wall has not changed. The world has.

Perhaps that, ultimately, is the true silent label.

Not a missing caption. But a caption that History has not yet finished writing.