An Article by A. V. (858 words, 5 min. read)
There is an exquisite honesty to systems that fall apart in style. With In Entropy, Ghazi Baker invites us into that exquisite unraveling. We are invited not as spectators of disaster, but as participants in the architecture of disorder. On view in Beirut and curated by Mark Hachem, this compelling exhibition stands as a witty, fractured, and profoundly human meditation on the contradictions of modern life.
Baker doesn’t paint paintings. He builds glitching blueprints, jokes in diagram form, emotional crash tests. The works in In Entropy speak in the formal language of order—grids, symmetry, signage, codes—but their content is pure rupture. Behind every clean line lies collapse; within every typographic declaration, a punchline or a plea.
The Satirical Seduction of Systems
At the heart of Baker’s practice is a mischievous refusal to play by the rules, even when he appears to obey them. Pieces like LOVE™ – Some Side Effects May Occur and What Could Be, What Is masquerade as design artifacts. Their typography and layout are seductively legible, almost corporate in their control. But look closer: the declarations falter, the icons betray their purpose, and you’re left with something that isn’t quite love, isn’t quite life. It’s branding. It’s noise. It’s entropy packaged with a user interface.
In Baker’s universe, meaning is always just slightly out of reach, and that’s the point. His works are not the breakdown of logic, but logic itself clearing up gracefully under the weight of human contradiction. The result is both hilarious and haunting.
Portraits of the Glitching Self
Identity, for Baker, is no sacred territory. In Puzzled: Rearranging the Self, a modular self-portrait rendered in movable panels, the face becomes a toy, a construct, a comedy of emotional motion. In Entropy in Chief, the artist turns his gaze outward to critique political power as performance art, painting a grotesque, media-saturated specter of leadership that teeters between caricature and collapse.
These portraits don’t ask us to recognize a person. They ask us to recognize a condition: fractured, performative, constantly rebranding. “Any resemblance to a stable individual,” Baker quips, “is purely algorithmic.”
The Geometry of Feeling
Perhaps what’s most poignant in In Entropy is how Baker translates raw emotional states into visual form. The Quiet Death of Potential is a eulogy to neglected dreams, rendered through the absurdity of bureaucratic signage: “DO NOT FEED PLANT.” Anatomy of an Outburst explodes with the soundless chaos of miscommunication, mouths and megaphones blurred into a storm of static. Even in A Flower for You, one of the exhibition’s softer offerings, the gesture of tenderness is framed within fracture; a single bloom presented inside collapse. These are not purely intellectual works. They are acts of emotional excavation. Baker’s grids may be perfect, but his hearts are breaking in pixelated silence.
Entropy That Stands Tall
With the inclusion of the XX, XY, XXY sculptures, Baker expands his two-dimensional commentary into physical space. These stainless steel and metal figures are not anatomical statements, but theatrical silhouettes; playful, absurd, emotionally fraught. They perform identity rather than inhabit it, masking fragility with industrial gloss.
Baker describes them as “caricatures of expectation.” And indeed, they strut and stagger with all the contradictions of our age: joy and exhaustion, certainty and confusion, the burden of performance weighing on hollow, beautiful forms.
The Archive, the Aftermath, the Joke
In Entropy feels both chilling and cathartic. The Archive of a Nervous Civilization is perhaps the show’s emotional apex: a disjointed spreadsheet of symbols, figures, and noise that catalogues the anxiety of modern systems. It is both data and decay. Meaning lingers like a ghost. As Baker says, “It’s not chaos by accident. It’s order gone stale.”
This is the thread that holds the exhibition together: the idea that we’re all maintaining appearances while the underlying code falters. The signage still shines, the fonts still match, but nothing connects. We caption instead of speak. We optimize love. We filter life. We run systems long after they’ve lost their purpose.
A Question of Style or Oversight?
However, something unexpected caught our attention: the presence of stripped, straight, colorful lines beneath the figures in several of the paintings. These elements immediately and unmistakably recalled the visual language recently adopted by artist Marwan Chamaa, who, notably, is also represented by Mark Hachem Gallery. Is this the emergence of a new aesthetic trend? A deliberate signature style endorsed by the gallery? Or perhaps an unfortunate overlap; a visual echo that raises questions about originality and curatorial oversight, particularly when it involves two major artists within the same roster?
Sabotage with a Smile
In Entropy is not a cry for help. It’s a smirk at the void. Ghazi Baker doesn’t just document the disintegration of meaning, he composes it. With wit, sharp aesthetics, and a fearless emotional vocabulary, he reminds us that disorder isn’t a failure. It’s a feature.
These works do not scream. They whisper through signs, smile through sabotage, and collapse beautifully in full view. In the end, Baker doesn’t offer escape from entropy. He offers companionship within it.
And maybe that’s the most human gesture of all.
