Practice

Francesco Lietti’s earliest works carry the imprint of a city encountered for the first time: its energy, its colour, and the particular quality of life that stays with you long after. That experience never left the work. What changed, gradually and almost without announcement, was the question being asked of it.

Practice is where feeling gives way to something harder to name: an investigation into how urban space is organised, layered, inhabited, and transformed; how people live within it, adapt to it, and leave their mark over time. The surface no longer just records how the city felt. It becomes a way of asking how it works.

Animated Contours

Through Animated Contours, Francesco Lietti deepens an approach he has long been developing: extracting the geometric patterns the eye recognises in the metropolis and rendering them through overlapping silhouettes and material volumes. In doing so, he introduces a first suggestive departure from two-dimensionality, opening toward future sculptural developments.

In this new layering, the sharp outlines of buildings become a geometric framework for the space above, while the horizon, shaped by that accumulation, redefines itself into a new coherence between human creation and the sky.

Mixed media on silhouetted wooden board.

Essential Contours

In Essential Contours, Lietti pushes further into the direction opened by Vertical Syntax. The silhouettes are generated with CAD: precise, structurally rigorous, and echoing the logic of how cities are actually built. Yet within them, drawn marks and colour continue to generate a rhythm that formal rigour has not fully absorbed.

Each building holds its own story, its own character. The emotional register of the earlier series has not yet fully transformed into formal investigation, and that tension — between the defined outline and the inner vitality — reflects a practice still in motion.

Mixed media and wood collage on silhouetted wooden board.

Vertical Syntax

Vertical Syntax is a prelude. After two decades of observing the city, Francesco Lietti lets it settle, and what resurfaces is no longer image alone, but language: vertical volumes, layered surfaces, the weight and rhythm of what rises.

A geometric syntax takes shape here, opening toward a dimension still largely unexplored, where the work grows quieter and the questions it asks grow deeper.

Mixed media and wood collage on wooden board.