Works

Francesco Lietti’s mixed-media urban compositions begin with sensation: the colours, rhythms, and visual intensity of cities encountered and absorbed. They extract the iconic from the urban fabric, holding onto the atmosphere of a place long after the moment of encounter has passed.

Colour and layering carry the emotional charge. What accumulates on the surface moves between memory and structure, between what was seen and what remains. Works represents an essential strand of Lietti’s practice: one he continues to return to alongside newer lines of enquiry.

All series are mixed media and collage on canvas; explore each of them fully through the links below.

Urban Reveries

Urban Reveries returns to the panoramic city, but from a different distance. These are no longer observations from within, but distillations: cities reduced to their most recognisable essentials, with the lightness that comes from knowing a subject deeply.

Francesco Lietti treats the cityscape here as affectionate shorthand — immediate, composed, entirely his own. The complexity has not disappeared. It has been set aside, deliberately, to let something else breathe.

Becoming Forms

Becoming Forms is where a new direction begins to take shape. Still inside the city’s density, Francesco Lietti absorbs it whole: its colour, its signage, its pulse. But the gaze is changing.

In this mixed-media series, the artist moves closer, searching for something harder to name. The perspective shifts. Beneath the vibrating surface, geometric patterns begin to emerge. The city has not changed. The eye has.

Tong Lau

Tong Lau is where Francesco Lietti’s gaze settles on a single subject: the layered facades of Hong Kong’s traditional tenement buildings. Here, architecture reveals its own repetition, its own rhythm — floor upon floor, balcony upon balcony.

Along the older streets of the city, the artist moves close, filling that grid with colour, text, and the small marks that any surface accumulates over time. Not the city as panorama. The city as skin.

Abstract Spin

In Abstract Spin, the city arrives all at once. Colour, text, pattern, and layer collide across the surface — absorbed, accumulated, and held together by an underlying compositional instinct that never quite announces itself.

Francesco Lietti allows the urban atmosphere to saturate the work before it is pared back into structure. Architecture is already present, quiet beneath the intensity — not yet as structure, but as sensibility.

Urban Osmosis

Urban Osmosis is where it begins. The city arrives the way it does on first contact: all colour, motion, and feeling. Hills, water, boats, sky — the urban landscape is still landscape here, buildings rising among natural elements, vivid and various.

Francesco Lietti is not yet selecting or distilling. Something else is driving the work: more instinctive, less deliberate. A response. An absorption. The city, taken in whole.