Alexandre de Betak:Let There Be Light

“I feel like what I am doing now is what I’ve always done, but changing the tools and setting,” says Alexandre de Betak about his recent shift from running his global production agency, Bureau Betak into working on his own artistic projects. With Betak, there is no category into which the multitalented creative can be placed, making this transition all the more layered and dynamic.

After selling his company to The Independents, in 2021, where he still remains Creative Chairman, de Betak was ready to start working in a different way, focusing more on his own personal projects. “In order to move forward towards the creative obsessions I have, I need to be completely free of these [prior] artistic compromises,” he explains. Part of this process of finding creative freedom came with setting up a studio in London, a city that he knew well from work but had no connections with or any preconceived ideas. De Betak has always led a bit of an itinerant lifestyle, from running around Paris as a young boy, camera in hand, to setting up his business in 1990s New York to Paris, Mallorca or an annual trip to Japan. For this new phase, London felt like the right place to start fresh. “I like the neutrality of London, which gives complete freedom,” he explains. “And I was intrigued by the all the people who have left in the past few years, which I always see as the beginning of something interesting – for better or for worse – there is a shift happening, and I am also shifting, transitioning into a completely new lifestyle as well.”

While de Betak always had freedom running Bureau Betak, at the end of the day, there was always the client, the brief, the brand’s heritage and vision. “Now,” he confesses, “being alone with a white canvas and no brief, no demands, no format or audience, this is way more difficult.” At the core of his creative universe is an obsession with light, the effect of light and the process of using light to transform a space or environment. Previously, this was done in a massive scale for fashion shows or large events, but now, he is taking it into a more personal realm, using light as a medium to create sculptural objects and immersive installations that are more intimate, even if they are not necessarily small-scale. For Frieze London, in October 2025, de Betak presented his first installation, built into his studio in London; the installation remains open and evolving, an ongoing site-specific experience. Housed in a traditional mews, the painted blue shuttered doors open up into an unexpected, sci-fi like setting, with modular stacks of standard office-style fluorescent lights. De Betak has managed to take a light fixture that most associate with dreary office jobs and with washing people out, into something vibrant and sexy. The mirrored floor and matt white frames or reflective black walls reverberate the light across the space. “I’m interested in exploring scale, and I like the irony of extreme contrasts, where I can go towards more intimate experiences and play with them but also thru a large scale,” he says.

De Betak’s career grew alongside the era of globalization, when brands launched stores and shows in new countries – Russia, China, the Middle East, but he always fought against the uniformity that was gradually taking over. He was more interested in doing a deep analysis of the culture, studying its traditions, its architecture, its craft. This passion and curiousity led to his recent installation in Gstaad, opened during Gstaad Art Week, in which he transformed a traditional wooden Alpine barn into a reflection of a chashitsu, the traditional space for a Japanese tea ceremony, using rows of office lights. The installation sets up a conversation between two very important vernacular architectures and cultures, Alpine Swiss and traditional Japan, which might not otherwise have much knowledge of one another. De Betak is working on two future iterations of this project, another installation in Gstaad next year and another version in Japan.

While he may be working on his own time-frame now, this doesn’t mean that de Betak is slowing down, rather the creative continues to work on multiple projects at once. In addition to the Gstaad project, he is also putting the final touches on a new book that will be released with Phaidon in September 2027, which dives into his obsessions and the importance of creative and artistic interdisciplinarity. “It doesn’t matter to me when I have an idea, material or tool that obsesses me, whether I am going to use it for the design of an object, art installation, interior, sculpture or show; For me, it is all the same at the end of the day. The outcome is different but the creative process could have been the same and the technical knowledge of the tool or medium would be the same,” de Betak explains. There will also be an exhibition of light sculptures at Salon 94, in November. He’s developing new electronic systems that will make the sculptures and installations wireless and which can be personally programmed, queuing and synching to fit his vision.

Alexandre de Betak has spent decades shaping the visual language of fashion and culture on a global scale, yet this new chapter, one focused on his personal passions, may bring something even more intriguing. Freed from briefs and clients, de Betak brings his same obsessive energy and curiosity inward, with light becoming a new form of creative expression.

@alexdebetak