Absence

(…)I will begin this journey through the work which, maybe, will then be less paradigmatic from her work: a landscape at night where one can make out a small house glowing and moving, with a grain that undoes the image and a light that works as if it were a mere remain, a pictorial stain in the image. The density of the photography contrasts with previous works of the artist; the way how the mystery is lead as well.
(…)A closer look reveals that the image was taken from outside the house, near the forest which, with its monumental shade, drowns out the dim light that survives in the night. Time allows us to discover that the image is in contact with the house in front of us, possibly another lonely house that hides another life, another hidden flavour. Be that as it may, the first house – the one in which we are able to enter through other glances – sets the tone of our look, even if it reveals itself as an absent protagonist we can feels its presence around us, almost supportive so to speak, almost as a human presence. In other words, I would say that the landscape in the work of Rita Magalhães acts as a portrait more so than a landscape, as a peaceful memory. Each place portrayed hides an absence; it draws nostalgic longings which we must reconstruct according to our own personal experiences and restlessness. What has happened that is unknown to us? However, to this artist all possess a legacy; an accumulated worth, lost and altered by the passage of time. Life is transformed into a memory which arrives to us quite slowly, with failures and loopholes as if it were an appeaseable dream. In her latest work we are able to make out how her photographic brushstroke has become denser and thicker, more vibrant.
(…) Rita Magalhães intention is never to see what we in fact see, but rather try to find out that which we don’t see, that which is no there.
(…) She intends, in her landscapes, to go beyond that opaque curtain that is the night, which waits for its moment, dyed in blue, almost virginal. Thus, the reality of that landscape individualizes the motives when it agglomerates in a ‘whole’ everything else, as if we were drawing a curtain in a soft manner, as if it were a caress. The cold and blue atmosphere, the nostalgic longing of the person who, we assume, watches – who is none other than ourselves – and that remnant of life that we see in the frame of the window or that we simply infer from the dark reality, lead us once again to the aforementioned Friedrich and his intention that things express themselves more strongly when we are confronted with their absence. The drama is summoned by each missing thing, by the emotion and feeling of a virtual viewer that will finish the viewing. It is because of this that the work of Rita Magalhães possesses that intemporal essence and, in many instances, indefinable. In all other series made by this artist we are left with the feeling of standing outside of time, of having disappeared in a trip without ever leaving home, Always starting out from a certain air of melancholy, of an intimate, wandering and fragmented view. Rita Magalhães lies to us when she simulates the stopping of time, including, the prolonging or delaying of it, and we – knowing that time never stops – accept her game and assume the brief as being eternal. Therefore it is not her intention to spell it all out but rather to discover or uncover an enigma just like some photographers, like Sudek, do, and because of this, her photography becomes, more and more, vaporous and dematerialized in lights and shades. That type of restlessness is also translated in her taste for the schematic and the sketch, for the minimal trace, by that particular gesture of drawing. The descriptive agonizes and the light threatens to convert itself in shade or blindness
(…).In a way, everything that is announced becomes a more silent work, but also a work more open to various possibilities of interpretation. The figure of her model, little by little, loses her physical presence and the motives are reduced. The lines melt and do not define anything, the light and the reflection demand the protagonism, and the image, more indirect, thins itself until it reaches the purest lightness of a shirt that hints of a body that no longer is a body but rather an outlined drawing.

David Barro