Houses at Szentendre with Crucifix 1937

Vajda Lajos made "Houses at Szentendre with Crucifix", we think, with oil on canvas. It's a trip, right? The forms are all fractured. Lajos's palette is really grounded, using earth tones and a pale blue. I can tell you, as a painter, this is not as simple as it looks. The architecture seems to float over the composition as a whole, but with a strange, surreal perspective and collage-like sensibility. There's a cruciform shape hovering right above the apex of the houses. It's really striking! The texture is a bit obscured, but it has a matte finish which I like. In general, you can see he's building up the forms with transparent layers of paint. These shapes overlap in a way that creates an interesting psychological tension in the piece. It's like a dreamscape, where you're not sure what's real and what's not. Vajda Lajos died young, so it is hard to tell how his work would have evolved, but this piece puts me in mind of Giorgio de Chirico, who also created strange scenes with eerie, dreamlike qualities. In the end, art's a conversation, right? And it's one that keeps going, even after the artist is gone.