The work is a first reflection on what I am seeing as a theme, which is closely related to water. As in other paintings, I start from this assumption of taking the symbolic character of water in a more universal way: an element of life, renewal and baptism, but also has a historical counterpoint since water was a key element in ethnic-racial discrimination, in events like “blacks in the pool” and the traffic of African civilizations to Brazil, involving drownings and tragedies, where water ends up becoming an element that is also mortal.

I see this as an imaginary construction in this universe. And in a very propitious way, the figure of Fata Morgana appeared, who is a witch character of Illusions, and is also the name given to an optical event that happens on the horizon line when you look at the sea. In this case due to evaporation of the water and the refraction of the light, when you look at the boats in the horizon, create this impression of a levitation, leading to a ghostly scene.

Thinking about this relationship between the idea of ​​ghost, haunting, mirage and hallucination, the idea of ​​the painting gravitates towards this sense: it is a child's body in midair, he is literally floating before touching the surface of the water, as if himself embodied this phantasmagoria. At first it is a very banal and playful scene: a child jumping into the pool, which gives a character of fun and lightness, but which is also an illusion since it refers to this phantasmagoria. In which, while he is reflected in the pool, it is as if he were seeing all this tragic past of the Atlantic transit in the slaveholding period. So this dual ambience is created. At the same time that there is play, there is this extremely heavy confrontation, loaded with this illusion.

The painting contains elements that justify this: the dragonfly, which is also phantasmagoric, is an insect that marks a break of illusions in the symbolic character, and in the lower right corner there is a little wooden boat, which makes reference to these vessels that still exist when we think of human trafficking, especially of African people, trying to cross the ocean to reach the European coast, for example. But at the same time this little boat is not in the water, and it is overturned, as if in a way, despite these pains and regrets, the child, through her own action, overturned that boat.