Giancarlo Leone’s Photographs Dissolve Urban Architecture into Water Reflections

Giancarlo Leone’s photographic project 'The City On The Water – Cercando la Città Altrove' opens May 2, 2025 at Galleria Poma in Morcote, Switzerland, running through May 31, 2026. The series captures reflections of cities—Milan, Venice, Lugano—in rivers, canals, and water surfaces, transforming solid architecture into unstable, painterly images. Leone avoids documentary representation, instead creating perceptual thresholds where urban space becomes rhythm, light interference, and pictorial field. The work questions whether authentic urban living can still be recognized, answering through loss and instability. Water functions not as subject but as a device that filters, deforms, and delays perception, constructing a critical distance that reveals an 'elsewhere'—a slower, contemplative city that exists only when rigidity dissolves. The gallery’s location on Lake Lugano resonates with founder Paolo Poma’s 1970s public reflections on environmental quality and urban-ecosystem relationships. An inaugural dialogue with Christian Bernasconi bridged artistic and scientific perspectives, converging on water as a measure. Each image is a passage that disrupts everyday seeing, opening space to rethink the city as shared experience rather than infrastructure.