Reflets dans l`eau

What most impresses us in this work by Rita Magalhães is the preponderance of the image reflected in the water, an image which, through being reflected, we imagine to be diffuse. But what is in fact diffuse is the bottom of the water, or, if we like, the water itself. We do not think there will be a reflection, but a curtain that separates us from reality, a reality that we only clearly glimpse when a warm colour is superimposed over the curtain itself. Dry, red leaves that float, not over the water, but in it. Because it is in the water that we discover that we are, where the only presence is sometimes that of red leaves or that of the image of a building that float in it.
Reflets dans l’eau, is the title that Debussy adopted for the first of a set of three Images for piano, premiered in 1906, and which led Vladimir Jankélélevitch to refer to him as “the musician of the reflections that Monet painted.” Thus music and painting came together in a single theme requiring movement and colours in diffuse impressions from both of them.
One hundred years later, Reflets dans l’eau is no more than a series of colours in images without outline reflected by the water of a river, or of rapid and whimsical arpeggios following suspended and juxtaposed harmonies.
One hundred years later, Reflets dans l’eau are blue or green spectrums and in them there appears to be neither sound nor movement.
Why Reflects dans l’eau? We more easily imagine that which Ondine might have seen, before emerging in order to seduce a mortal in the poem by Aloysius Bertrand that led Ravel to write Gaspard de la nuit. We imagine Transblucency, in which Duke Ellington mixes the clarinet, the soprano saxophone and the voice of a lyrical soprano like someone mixing colours on a palette and from all these he obtains a homogeneous and transparent blue. We even imagine ourselves to be in the courtyard of Debussy’s Underwater Cathedral, looking at the sky beyond the water.
Or we might imagine silence. Or even solitude.
What is extraordinary is to admit that the subject is the same. One hundred years later we imagine all this, although we continue to look at reflections in the water.

Francisco Albuquerque