There is no measure for the lightness that results from the process of restoring all the essential fragments of the delicate experience of the inevitable. It is a process of “letting it happen”; of lowering the arms and learning to accept reality. It is the look at a touch, a whisper, a trace: the vestige left by an encounter between two bodies. The dialogue established between all images, whether they have greater or lesser tangibility, is that of the apprehension of a residue – the play of light that these tiny elements present with their surroundings, the trace left by the presence of something in a particular place. When considering the touch of two unconscious bodies, one considers the independent dialogue: the tree that falls unheard, the drop of water that dries unseen, the leaf that withers without being touched. This dialogue happens, impassive to the passing observer, and is captured in media res.

For Rita, who enters as the mediator of contact between vestigial elements, her task is to organize and arrange the chaotic natural randomness, walking the fine line where the casual event meets the deliberate. The clear connection that manifests between the apprehension of the trace and the activation of memory. The image presents itself as a matrix that has witnessed the casual touch; the hand collaborates in the process of remembering, reactivating the event.

There is a strong focus on the reading of the work, which is remarkable for the organization and scrutiny it undergoes. The hand that comes to activate the event of remembering does not work from a cold, calculated premise, from an analytical or pragmatic observation. There is an emotional sensitivity operating in the decision to reanimate, in the process of exalting these small phenomena. However, there is still a calculated order in the results. Her reading of her own work is quite open. Her presence as an observer-curator aims to ensure the safety of the moment; to guarantee its importance. The same deliberate gaps in the images presented for the artist herself also serve to entice the viewer to seek a closer relationship with the pieces that are produced. The small details; the minutiae with which the most precise moments are captured.

It is a love letter to life that in no way seeks to hide the ruin that comes with it. The most prominent vestige is precisely this trace of life that passes indifferently to us. The reading we make of the world is the only thing that has any influence on the perception we then have of these images – these brilliant ghosts that comfort and highlight the apparent, the ordinary, the seemingly ordinary, and the commonly transcendental with which we stumble daily. I look at the walk along the bus route and see a flower that I immediately store as an image, either mentally or photographically. My eyes do not know how else to work this communication between the world that enters through my pupils and the objective reality; there is no barrier to mediate this inevitable invasion. I immediately think of Rita, and how she surely already has a much more beautiful and delicate flower carefully catalogued in a herbarium, along with the leaf of the plant that accompanies it.

The minuteness that brings me closer to the flower on the ground is the same minuteness that presents itself to the viewer; that invites a closer approach, a deeper engagement and experience. An obligation to witness the simplest, the fragile. Coincidentally, there is not much fragility in the work presented to us as viewers. It is an unchanging fossilized reality, unfolding in different media, sometimes more or less brittle, but never presenting itself as fragile. The experience of the sensitive is not an experience of the fragile.

There is something surgical in the white light that bathes the entire work. An attempt to exhaust any secret that might be present in the materials, washed by this brilliant flood. Light. Impressions made by light. In Rita’s work, everything is light; it is the vehicle that the image finds to present itself, and perhaps this is why there is such a strong presence of light in her work: there is a deep desire to make the contact that happened immensely clear. The emotional and sensory need to illuminate the subject, so that all the visual aspects that, in turn, already carry the light, become obvious. Light is not just an element that illuminates; it is also, often, an element that belongs to the image being prepared for the viewer, one of the elements that makes contact in the work and makes any pretense of exploration possible. It emerges as a divine guide. There is something incredibly spiritual – not religious – in the images presented. Not religious, because there is no need for devotion, no particular sense of admonishment to be offered in front of these images, but there is still a sense of finding a unity, of finding the apparent sacred union made in the images. Something murmured about this support that now murmurs to the viewer. There is indeed something immensely spiritual to be observed in the process Rita applies to these images, these herbarium elements, and in everything she touches with the greatest attention: an exaltation of the smallest demonstrations of life when in contact with some of the largest – the stamens of flowers that are celestially enveloped in sunlight.

The fluidity with which the work is made is also an important part of this process of understanding the experience of the sensitive. The random is desired and, to some extent, it stops being random. There is a very clear intention to let things simply happen as they must. The quimigrams or oil paintings live precisely from Rita’s intervention in the process of "initiating" the random. What happens in this reaction between different materials, forms, colors, elements, is beyond the reach and control of the author. The following work is simply moderation of the results, interpretation of the signs, apprehension of the traces. The unexpected does not need to be tamed. It only needs to be carefully studied and cataloged. Like the people around us, the world around us is also alive, in constant motion, in perpetual turmoil. There may be no measure for the experience of the inevitable, but there is certainly the possibility of making sure it does not go unnoticed. I find in one of my notebooks a note I took from an artist’s book that Rita presented to me some time ago. In her words: “Where there is light, I run after it.”

Text by Nuno Ferreira for the First Issue of Paralaxe.