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.