Vajda Lajos Madonna Gyermekkel 1938 1938

This is Vajda Lajos' 'Madonna and Child', made in 1938, seemingly with pencil or charcoal. Look at how these marks create a space of inquiry for both the artist and us, the viewers. I feel this piece came into being through touch, through repetition of a gesture. You can imagine Lajos might have been thinking about a certain kind of light, maybe recalling forms and shapes from memory. The texture is really something here, isn't it? The marks, like erasures, create a push-pull effect and suggest a kind of tension. The form emerges slowly from the darkness, like a memory struggling to surface. It reminds me of Goya, someone else who wasn't afraid of the dark. But what really strikes me is how the image embraces ambiguity, refusing any kind of singular reading. Lajos’s marks leave space for multiple interpretations and meanings, so we are not so much looking at the Madonna and Child, as we are looking *through* the image, into the process of its making.