Literature

"Fata Morgana" refers to a medieval sorceress of illusions, as well as a mirage on the ocean’s horizon, creating the impression of ghostly levitation.

 
Fata Morgana no 1 is a reflection of an ongoing theme in Obá’s work: water. Contemplating the relationship between ghosts, haunting, mirages, and hallucination, Fata Morgana no 1 depicts a child mid-air, floating before he breaks the surface of the water, as if an embodiment of this phantasmagoria. At first, the painting is a banal and playful scene of a child jumping into a pool. Yet, this lightness is also an illusion, refers once more to this phantasmagoria. In his reflection in the pool, he seems to read the tragic past of the transatlantic path of enslaved peoples in the water.

The painting contains elements that signal this: the wooden toy boat suggests the vessels that crossed the Atlantic ocean, as well as transportation methods in contemporary human trafficking, especially of African peoples. Yet, the boat does not touch the water, overturned, as if the child has overturned such pain. The dragonfly symbolizes a break in illusion.

Oba in his own words:

“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.”