In Conversation | Charlotte de Belle’s ‘Unveiled’ Lives in Light and Movement

Some works don’t begin until you do. In her piece Unveiled, Dubai-based artist Charlotte de Belle builds from a place she’s returned to again and again, where material meets light, where the physical meets something more intangible. As a Neon Artist, de Belle’s work has always ‘lived at the intersection of material and light – the relationship between something physical you can touch, and energy you can only witness.’ 

She goes on to mention that while studying art, she spent years exploring how everyday materials transform when placed inside the right conditions. In her art pieces, foil, metal, glass, paper, elements most people pass by without thinking, become charged once light enters the room. 

‘I’m obsessed with what happens to these surfaces when light strikes them at an angle,’ says de Belle. ‘The way reflection becomes a living thing is an obsession that led me here.’ 

Built entirely by hand, where de Belle manipulated each fold, each crease of reflective silver paper individually. ‘It is sculptural, a topography of light where no two moments look the same. Depending on where you stand, the piece breathes differently. It shifts. It responds to you.’

At the unveiling of her piece at the IQOS Boutique in Dubai Mall, Charlotte de Belle doesn’t want you standing still. You’re not a passive viewer here – she asks you to move, to engage, to meet the light halfway. ‘I want to ask something of you,’ she says. ‘Please do not stand still.’

Complex MENA: Tell us a bit about your art practice?

Charlotte De Belle: I’m a neon artist, so my work always lives at the intersection of raw material and this energy of light that you can only really witness. Neon is such a specific kind of light – it’s made from glass tubes that we hand-bend using fire, and inside there’s a noble gas, so it carries this real energy. And the way we work with it hasn’t really changed since it was first discovered.

Complex MENA: Your work often treats light as something emotional rather than just also purely functional. So when you begin a project, are you designing to illuminate, to atmosphere, to communicate a certain emotion? How, how does that approach go down? 

Charlotte De Belle: Basically I am obsessed with what happens to the surface when the light hits it. So I would not only think about the end result, but I will think about the surroundings and how it changes and it transforms the place and the space around it. 

So once I get a sense of the feeling I want the piece to carry, what I want the viewer to experience, then I start thinking about which materials can express that. Whether it leans into mixed media, or uses more reflective elements like silver 

Complex MENA: What about the materials you work with? 

I love to work with chrome because of how it catches light, it feels really noble as a material.  So I work with chrome across the spectrum, from solid to reflective paper, I’m drawn to its rawness and the way light moves across it.

It’s all about the spectrum of light. The way all the colours are mixing together – nothing acts alone. It’s something really core to my practice, is that the piece gives something, the viewer gives something back so there’s always movement.

Complex MENA: And how did that apply in terms of this art piece?

Charlotte De Belle: This specific piece was really about collaboration as well. I love working with brands because it takes me in directions I probably wouldn’t explore on my own.

IQOS brought an energy, they brought a space, and that impacted me, and the piece itself. The collaboration became part of how I built it, even down to introducing colours I might not have used alone, and how I blended them together.

There are, for example, two colours in the frame – but you only see the purple when you move around it. It comes from the blue and the pink combining.

So the viewer has to move around the piece to really discover those layers and colours.

Complex MENA: Why those colors?

Charlotte De Belle: That’s a result of the collaboration as well because the product is electric purple. Actually, it’s only the neon light that is purple.  And you can discover the purple when you move around with the frame. So it’s quite subtle in a way. 

Complex MENA?  What does particularly this kind of purple symbolize to you?

Charlotte De Belle: Emotionally, I find the purple quite a soft and nurturing colour in a way. But it also has this… well, it’s in the name, electric. It’s this electricity and energy. 

So what I’m trying to do in my practice. Is to have two contrasting tensions, for example, either rawness and refined or movement and stillness. 

And the purple for me has a combination of these two things – nothing acts alone. 

Complex MENA: And how does Dubai come into all this and your practice in general?

Charlotte De Belle: Well, since I arrived in 2007, Dubai immediately showed me how the impossible can be possible. My first task was designing what was, at the time, the biggest billboard in the world – on Sheikh Zayed Road near the Mall of the Emirates. It’s now split into four, but back then it was one massive structure.

That experience stayed with me. It made me realize that any idea you have, there’s always a way to make it happen. You see it in the architecture, in so many things here – they constantly prove that your idea isn’t crazy. It can be possible.