Vajda Lajos Szárnyverdesők 1939 1939

Vajda Lajos made Szárnyverdesők in 1939, and its all about the stark contrast between black and white. It's an image built up of marks, gestures, a kind of process you can feel in your bones. The physicality of the medium is clear, isn’t it? The texture feels almost bristly, scratchy even. Look at how the lines form shapes, building up the forms of the birds in flight. There's a nervous energy to the marks, a kind of insistent repetition that I find really compelling. See how, in the top left corner, the hatching creates a sense of depth and volume? It’s almost as if the birds are emerging from the page itself. It reminds me a bit of the work of some of the German Expressionists, Kirchner maybe, who were also interested in this kind of raw, unvarnished approach to image-making. What Lajos is doing, like all great art, is embracing ambiguity, inviting us to bring our own interpretations to the table.