CURARE

Ongoing digital photography series, 2023 - present.


In this series, Alexandre Liberato approaches the city as a surface in suspension. The immense protective fabrics that temporarily cover buildings under construction are detached from their utilitarian function and perceived instead as unstable pictorial fields: monochromes interrupted by folds, tensions, shadows, accidental geometries. What ordinarily belongs to the background of urban life acquires a silent monumentality. These structures do not represent architecture; they momentarily replace it, transforming the city into an image that oscillates between disappearance and revelation.

The title CURARE introduces an important displacement. The Latin root evokes care, healing, and the possibility of transformation, but not in a direct or illustrative sense. The works suggest that healing begins with a modification of perception itself. To look slowly, to remain available to what exceeds immediate functionality, becomes an ethical and aesthetic gesture. In this sense, the series proposes that the sublime is not exclusively tied to nature or catastrophe, as in the Romantic tradition, but can emerge from the anonymous and transitional spaces of contemporary urban life. The sublime already inhabits these surfaces; it simply demands a certain openness from the gaze.

Kant understood the sublime as an experience produced when imagination reaches its own limit before something immeasurable, discovering in this failure another dimension of thought. The sensation does not belong entirely to the object, but to the movement of consciousness confronted with what escapes representation. CURARE operates precisely within this interval. The photographed fabrics conceal buildings, yet simultaneously produce vast abstract presences that seem larger than their material condition. Jean-François Lyotard later described the sublime as the tension between what can be presented and what remains unpresentable. Liberato’s images inhabit this threshold: they reveal surfaces that appear empty and opaque, but that continue to suggest something inaccessible behind and beyond them.

What makes the series singular is that this experience of the sublime is shared by both observer and artist. The act of photographing already implies a recognition — an acceptance that these temporary urban skins contain a latent emotional and symbolic force. The viewer is then invited to repeat this operation internally. CURARE proposes no explicit narrative of redemption, yet it insists on the possibility that a transformed way of seeing may also produce a transformed way of inhabiting the world. Within the accelerated logic of the contemporary city, these suspended surfaces become moments of pause: fragile spaces where contemplation, imagination, and perhaps even collective healing can still emerge.

series