Hublot's New Watch is an Art Work For Your Wrist
The late Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez achieved international renown for his wildly expressive and colorful paintings and installations. But he had always harbored a secret ambition: to design a watch.
Cruz-Diez was in the collections of major museums around the world, and some of his sculptures adorned large public landmarks, like the Marlins baseball park in Miami, but he thought a watch would make his work available on a smaller and more personal scale.
The Swiss luxury watchmaker Hublot approached Cruz-Diez for a collaboration and, before he died a year ago, they had fulfilled his horological fantasy twice over. His second watch collection for the brand made its debut in December, fittingly during the annual Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, and is available to buy online now. (The limited number of timepieces were finished before Hublot, alongside other watchmakers, temporarily closed its factory due to the Coronavirus pandemic.)
The new work, formally called the Classic Fusion Cruz-Diez, features an optical illusion of a dial that seems to change color every second over a 24-hour period. That's because the hour and minute hands are on separate levels, so they create different patterns when they rotate. In other words, it’s an exaltation of the kinetic qualities that defined Cruz-Diez’s artistic work.
“It’s like an homage to my father,” says his son, Carlitos Cruz.
Luxury brands are a regular presence now during art fairs, but watchmakers are a rarer sight, and collaborations with artists rarer still. Hublot, a 40-year-old watchmaker owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, sees the collaboration as a way to amplify its reputation for technical prowess with materials and complicated movements. The Fusion, for instance, comes in titanium, gold, and black ceramic.
“Not that many brands will take the challenge to create a watch linked to an art work,” says chief executive officer Ricardo Guadalupe.
The collaboration between the watchmaker and the artist began around 2015, when a Hublot retailer in Venezuela broached the idea with Guadalupe as a way to pay tribute to the country’s most well-known artist. Cruz-Diez, then 91, flew to Hublot’s factory in Switzerland to see for himself how a timepiece was made.
“My father was fascinated with the small pieces and the machinery,” his son recalls. “He saw the possibilities immediately.” To everyone’s surprise, the 90 or so pieces made then all sold. A sequel was inevitable.
Like the first iteration, this latest Fusion Classic will be made in limited editions.
“The commercial success is not the most important aspect of this collaboration,” Guadalupe says. “We do thousands of watches a year. What’s important is that it reminds people that we are different and innovative, and it makes them look at the watch and say, ‘Wow.’”
Some good news for aficionados and collectors: It’s unlikely to be the last Hublot watch to bear Cruz-Dies’s imprint.
Before he died, the master left behind several sketches that could be used for future prototypes.
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