Les deux oiseaux 1945

Etienne Hajdu’s sculpture, ‘Les deux oiseaux,’ feels like it was shaped rather than built, almost as if the artist worked by eroding the mass. The pale ochre surface is porous, and this texture suggests a kind of softness. The blockish forms have a strange, compelling geometry, and the smooth arcs of the upper bird’s neck seem to be echoed in the negative space beneath. There’s a play between positive and negative, figure and ground, that creates this tension between the geometric abstraction and the feeling that it’s figurative; that it's birds. The relationship reminds me of Arp or Brancusi, but Hajdu’s treatment has a tactile quality all its own. The whole object feels both organic and constructed, in a way that’s never quite resolved. It’s open to interpretation, and that’s what makes it so engaging.