There is a sense of expedition, like sailors to whom Pompey once said, ‘To sail is necessary; to live is not necessary’, in this body of work that Cláudio Garrudo presents at Galeria das Salgadeiras, the result of an artistic residency at sea, aboard a cargo ship, bound for a land whose name is not the most relevant. Let the mystery of arrival remain, since, as Miguel Torga says in the poem ‘Viagem’, which complements this exhibition, ‘What matters is to depart, not to arrive.’

From the top of the containers or from the ship’s tower, Cláudio Garrudo recorded, at various moments of the day, what surrounded him, sea, only sea. Or perhaps not… As the hours passed, the variations of light, the rising and setting sun, the time spent contemplating space brought him another reading of the horizon. And what if, far in the distance, there were land, the new land, the unknown land about to cease being so, a port hoped to be safe and solid?

The vertigo of illusion, of mirage, which so often confuses or gives hope to adventurers, emerges in his spirit and leads him to capture this reality through double exposures, not literal, but subjective, within this uninterrupted and eternal succession of moments. Images of the sea, and of a sea that ceases to be sea, becoming sky, land, isthmuses, capes, promontories; the torment of the waters or the peace found, speak to us of a physical or symbolic journey, and of real or imagined time.

Do we climb the stairs or descend them? Another of the questions this exhibition presents to us appears in the only image where the reference point is clearly defined, directing us to the space through which the crossing takes place. ‘I outfitted the boat of illusion,’ and perhaps it is no longer the Roman general commanding the hosts. After all, for Cláudio Garrudo, ‘To sail is necessary’ and to sail is to live.