Abdelké feels close to German Expressionists such as George Grosz,...and Kitty Kollwitz, for whom the violence of expression was mixed with bitter sarcasm and who saw in war “horror, mutilation, and annihilation.”

Starting in 1989, Abdelké painted a series of etchings on metal and intensely colored pastel and collage paintings on paper, which he called “The Figures Series”.

These triads represent, in a frontal and systematic way, as in Byzantine art, a maniacal and almost always identical infernal trio of executioners, grouped around the central sadistic figure of the leader as if he were an image of an inverted Christ Pantocrator.

Figures 5 For example, a pastel painting dated 1991, shows in the center a decorated general, with a moustachioed face and short hair, an amputee, with his fly open on a hanging rod, who holds in his hand a board asserting that 1 + 1 = 3 or that 1 +1=0, in a false calculation like the justice that “he gives back”.