Fire-Eye 1938

Vajda Lajos made this strange little drawing called ‘Fire-Eye’ and, wow, it's like he’s not trying to show us something, but rather to feel something. You can see that in how he uses marks: not to copy what’s in front of him, but to build up a feeling. Look at that orange shape at the top. Is it a flame, a head, a weird fruit? Those thick black lines and those eyelashes are so peculiar! The texture of the paper shows through, giving it this ghostly, unreal quality. Down below, the dark smudgy lines wrestle with each other, forming a body or maybe just a landscape. There’s this tension between what's clearly defined and what just sort of dissolves into a blur, like a dream. It feels raw, like someone figuring things out right in front of you. Think of Paul Klee, also trying to capture something beyond the surface. It’s less about what it is, and more about how it makes you feel. And that’s the real fire in the eye, isn’t it?