Vajda Lajos Világitó Szempár 1939, Szén Papír, 73x707,8cm 1939

Vajda Lajos made this charcoal drawing on paper in 1939. It's got a kind of raw, immediate quality – like he was trying to capture something fleeting. The texture is everything here. Look at the marks, those lines scratched into the paper. You can almost feel the energy of his hand moving across the surface, digging in. It’s not just about depicting something; it's about the physicality of the medium itself. There’s something kind of anxious and obsessive in this drawing. Those repeated marks, that dark hatching that coalesces into a strange kind of animal presence. And those eyes! They feel like peepholes into something else, something lurking just beneath the surface of the visible. I'm reminded of other artists dealing with surrealism and the unconscious at this time. Maybe someone like Leonora Carrington? Vajda’s work is its own thing, though. It’s like a portal into a different way of seeing – or maybe being seen.