Dear Shaded Viewers,
The light in Alexandre de Betak’s world has always been more than illumination—it is emotion, geometry, narrative. In his newly opened London studio, revealed during Art Week 2025, light becomes structure, sculpture, and the pulse of a new, independent artistic chapter. Composed entirely of light fixtures, the installation transforms an unfinished space into something hauntingly complete: a live experiment in scale, reflection, and sensation.
We first crossed paths in Paris in 1991, when I was working on La Balade de l’Amour, an AIDS benefit performance, and he—only 21 at the time—was its producer. Even then, de Betak possessed the rarest of gifts: the ability to distill atmosphere into architecture, to choreograph space as if it were sound. That intuition matured into a decades-long career defining the very language of fashion presentation. His sets became integral to the emotional architecture of the runway—from John Galliano’s decadent theatrical tableaux and Dior’s dreamscapes to the pristine geometry of Chanel and the ritual precision of Viktor & Rolf.
Now, with this luminous “in-progress” London atelier, de Betak turns that narrative gaze inward. The installation, a constellation of radiance and structure, feels like the first brushstroke of a personal renaissance. Hosted by Serena Rees, Valérie Sadoun, and Charlotte Stockdale during Frieze London—with music by Paul Simonon, cuisine by Rose Chalalai Singh, and a cocktail by Space Talk—the evening carried the electricity of beginnings.
De Betak’s return to pure experimentation signals not nostalgia but evolution. He once built worlds for others—now he is sculpting his own. This light installation, shimmering and incomplete, is both an opening and an introspection: a portal back to the raw energy that first filled a young Paris studio in the early ’90s and the same daring that continues to illuminate his universe today.
Later,
Diane
