Charles de Metz-Noblat

Charles de Metz-Noblat creates hybrid design pieces, informed by a cultivated engagement with the history of forms and their symbolism. He plays with periods and styles, deconstructing existing objects to reinvent their structure and uses, drawing on pop references and neo-classical heritage. His work examines the circulation of forms across time, which are reactivated and transformed through reuse and contemporary creation.

Educated at the École Supérieure d’Art et Design de Saint-Étienne (France), and shaped by close collaboration with multidisciplinary practitioners, he has developed a practice situated at the intersection of design, decorative arts, and sculpture. Within his work, the object becomes a vehicle for narrative, memory, and transformation. His professional experience with architect and interior designer Franz Potisek, followed by silversmith Jean Boggio, and currently with artist and designer François Mascarello, has informed an approach attentive to gesture, material, and craftsmanship, understood as autonomous languages.

Driven by a strong interest in furniture history, decorative arts, and curiosity objects, Charles de Metz-Noblat explores and combines traditional techniques—blown glass, wood, straw, or plexiglass marquetry, passementerie, gilding, and paperolles—which he diverts and recontextualizes to generate new formal narratives.

Reuse and the transformation of existing elements become, in his practice, a creative act in their own right, in which the memory of objects constitutes a living material. Conceived as narrative presences, his works thus combine historical fragments with contemporary elements produced specifically for each piece. Colored plexiglass, tubular stainless steel, baroque elements, and modernist references coexist within compositions that are both playful and rigorous, permeated by a sense of constructive exuberance.

The luminous collection ‘Manibus’ fully embodies this approach. The suspension, derived from the star-shaped structure of a 1970s chandelier, combines nickel-plated tubular steel with brass rods, plexiglass elements, and beechwood spheres. The light sources are crowned with hands in 3D-printed resin, sandblasted to evoke the soft, diffused appearance of pâte de verre.

The hand, a foundational motif with ancient and universal symbolism, here becomes at once lampshade, sign, and language. In the work of Jean Cocteau, it acts as a messenger capable of crossing thresholds between reality and imagination; within the surrealist universe, it detaches from the body, multiplies, and transforms, asserting its oneiric power. Charles de Metz-Noblat aligns himself with this symbolic lineage by making the hand a vector of narration and transmission. His hands, which receive the light and extend outward, invite a passage between temporalities, between function and narrative, reality and imaginative projection.

Born in 1990, Charles de Metz-Noblat graduated in 2015 from the École Supérieure d’Art et Design de Saint-Étienne with jury honors. He lives and works in Paris.