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One of the standout watches from the 2024 edition of Watches and Wonders was the limited Chopard L.U.C Quattro Spirit 25. It didn’t have eternal perpetual calendars, automatons, or moving flowers. It had a black enamel dial, white gold case, a single minute track and a jump hour. And it was perfect. Everything from the proportions to the font size to the inky darkness of the enamel contrasted with the dazzling white of the precious-metal case sat together flawlessly. Chopard wasn’t the only one wiping its dials clean. Louis Vuittton has ditched the crazy kaleidoscopes of its previous Escale incarnations and launched a time-only quartet where the only adornments are diamonds. Or a slice of meteorite on one dial. Minimalism in watches is nothing new perse, Patek Philippe, the ür-brand in this case, has been keeping things simple since 1932 when it launched the Calatrava.
“Few exceptions aside, luxury watchmaking is a European aesthetic culture, produced in Switzerland. Europe is historically divided into minimalist and maximalist approach to aesthetics,” explains Parmigiani CEO, Guido Terrini. “The first comes from a northern European way of seeing life. I would also add the importance of the protestant values that is conveys. It developed with the industrial revolution and the bourgeoisie, in opposition to the more flamboyant aristocracy that lost its hegemony on society and that definitively had a more maximalist approach to beauty.”
Terrini knows a thing or two about keeping things clean aesthetically. In 2021, the brand unveiled a new look. The most noticeable change was how clean the dials were, especially on the time-only models. Gone was the branding, apart from a subtle “PF” under the “12” hour marker. These timepieces were so pared back they didn’t even have a second hand. Over the last few years, Parmigiani has continued to experiment with minimalist watch design. It unveiled a travel design with delicate gold hand hidden underneath the primary hour hand, to be unveiled when needed. It followed up this idea with a unique minute rattrapante. This time the minute hand conceals another hand that can be set in five- or one-minute increments to act as a reminder. If you need to finish a task 20 minutes in the future, simply set the second minute hand forward twenty minutes and watch the other play catch up. No extra hands, no sub dials, just a discreet elegant reimagining of a function.
“The Tonda PF redefined the brand identity and is at the heart of the rebirth of the brand,” says Terrini. “It conveys a tension of an apparent simplicity, where the purity of the creative idea and the aesthetic is in opposition to the complexity and refinement of the making.” Like all minimalist art, there is a contradiction between appearance and reality. Terrini points out that if you study the Tonda carefully, it is far from simple. The bezel on the platinum models are hand knurled, the dial hand guilloched, and there is a play of polishing and brushing on the cases. As Terrini says, “The mood is very paired back, but it is not a pure minimalistic approach.”
In a way this is exactly how minimalism as an art form operates. Most art is usually the representation of the real world, or it reflects an emotion or a reality. Minimalist art addresses the notion that art should have its own reality not simply be an imitation of something else. It asks you to engage with the form the work takes and the materials from which it is made, not wondering whether it is standing in for something else.
Minimalism emerged in the late 1950s as a move away from so-called gestural art, embodied by the likes of Jackson Pollock, with roots in expressionism and abstract art. Instead of free-form brush strokes and daubed canvases, there was the Black Paintings of Frank Stella comprising lines of black separated by white lines that resemble magic-eye images. Or the controversial Equivalent VIII by sculptor Carl Andre, which caused outrage when, in 1972, it was found out the Tate had paid £2,297 of the taxpayers’ money on 120 bricks arranged on the floor in two layers. Other prominent figures also include Dan Flavin who worked with fluorescent light, Donald Judd who started as an art critic and went on to produce hollow rectilinear volumes that were an investigation of real space, and Agnes Martin with her serene grid compositions.
All these artists create compositions that appear simple but there is complexity in there too. Martin is perhaps the best illustration of that contradiction. Her beautiful grids, comprising thin lines drawn on oil paint, were composed through complex mathematical calculations and painstaking effort. To create the large-scale versions of her pieces, which she converted from small-scale ones, she would draw these lines guided by a straightedge or string stretched the length of the canvas. What appears uniform, on closer examination, reveals pencil lines veering off course as it encounters irregularities on the canvas’s surface. This truthfulness as seen in those irregularities gets to the heart of minimalist art, which offers a highly purified form of beauty because it cannot, or does not, pretend to be anything other than what it is.
So, can watches be truly minimalist if you think outside of a design context, and view them as a work of art? In so much as they do not pretend to be anything else, yes. However, their functionality lies in an abstract – the concept of time. Being a luxury product, it is also more than what it appears to be. It isn’t a pure representation of its own reality, it is a signifier for so much more – it is a status symbol, it gives the world a glimpse of your personality, your tastes. It isn’t an imitation of anything else as such, but it does represent an outside reality – one of money, style, design. Or maybe, this is overthinking things. Maybe when we talk about minimalism and timepieces, we’re just talking about well-designed watches. Pure and simple.
