The author captures the view from portholes during a sea voyage, deliberately choosing to divert the natural direction of the gaze. Where visual tradition would have us look outwards, seeking infinity and the horizon of the sea, his photographic investigation focuses on the glass itself, a fragile and apparently neutral surface, often ignored as a mere medium. This minimal but decisive shift brings about a radical reversal: the porthole is no longer a transparent window onto the landscape, but a subject in its own right, a visual body endowed with autonomy, a material that retains and at the same time reflects the gaze.

Far from being invisible, the glass reveals its density: scratches, oxidation, halos, sediments of time that pass through and consume it. These are the traces that, in normal use, would remain hidden, covered by the magnetic force of the sea and the line that marks its horizon. Instead, the author chooses to welcome them as presences, restoring dignity to what is normally confused with the visual silence of transparency. The porthole then offers itself as a mirror of an inner vision, as a surface that preserves the intimacy of the gaze and records its vulnerability.

This gesture affirms a language of limitation. Opacity, imperfection, and deterioration are no longer residues to be eliminated, but become signs, minimal writings of a time that spares nothing, not even what should be pure as a means to elsewhere. The image, thus, is not limited to documenting an object: it opens up a broader reflection on the very status of vision and its precariousness. We can never access the world directly, but always through surfaces, filters, and mediations. In this sense, the porthole is no longer just part of a ship: it becomes an allegory of human experience, a metaphor for the unbridgeable distance that separates desire from infinity, the gaze from the absolute.

The sea remains there, evoked but inaccessible, distant but present as a promise. What imposes itself on our view is not the open immensity of the horizon, but the concrete resistance of the glass, with its cracks and defects, with its silent but eloquent language. And it is precisely in this tension between the visible and the invisible, between the lack of transparency and the reflection obtained, that the work finds its poetic and philosophical strength. The porthole thus becomes a threshold and an obstacle, a barrier and a mirror: a device that reminds us how every vision is always situated, partial, marked by time and by the matter that makes it possible.

The image does not depict the sea, but our inability to reach it without passing through the fragile lens of perception. It does not speak of infinity, but of the conditions that separate us from it: time that engraves, memory that filters, experience that obscures. In this perspective, the work becomes a meditation on seeing itself, an invitation to recognize that absolute clarity does not exist and that the horizon, however desired, always remains an elsewhere from which we are separated by the living and irreducible matter of the world.