The history of high watchmaking is a chronicle of humanity trying to understand nature and time. For centuries watchmakers have worked to fit cosmic time onto a wrist by means of wheels, mainsprings and escapements.
But the Vanguard Slim Amador Montes, the latest fruit of the project Franck Muller Mexico has carried out with the Mexican contemporary artist Amador Montes, turns a mechanical object into something far deeper, into a biological and philosophical microcosm.
Beyond the striking rose gold case, beyond the living tones that run across the dial and beyond the philosophy of “Sin Ti Nunca”, meaning never without you, this particular watch reminds us, through the entomological detail on its dial, of the immense engineering in the smallest elements of nature. The Vanguard Slim Amador Montes turns the conventional definition of luxury inside out and makes haute horlogerie into an artist’s canvas and an anthropological diary. The mechanism we carry on the arm is not merely counting seconds; it whispers that we are small parts of billions of years of evolutionary history, of an ecological balance, and of a flawless order in creation.
format_quote"The mechanism we carry on the arm is not merely counting seconds; it whispers that we are small parts of an ecological balance."
Hasan Bekmezci
The creatures and the symbolic objects Amador Montes has brought onto this singular dial were never chosen at random; on the contrary, they draw a deep map of the ecosystem and of human memory.
The large flying arthropod at the very centre of the dial, whose wings have become the hands that tell the time, speaks for the central node of the ecosystem. The maker has given the creature its name: a crane fly, the long-legged fly of damp meadows. Creatures of this kind hold up the chain of agricultural production by pollinating plants, speed the recycling of organic matter by aerating the soil beneath our feet, and form the firmest step of the food pyramid as the basic food source of a great many animals, from frogs to birds. Without them the cycle of life on earth stops. The crane fly’s own share of that work happens underground: the larva shreds dead plant matter and loosens the soil, while the winged adult lives only a few days, often never feeding at all, and is written onto the table of birds, bats and fish.
The scorpion and the minimal bird figures scattered over the dial recall the predator and prey balance of nature and the flawless chain reaction of the food chain. Each creature is like one of the wheels that keeps the pendulum of this microcosm swinging.
Objects such as the sewing machine and the plant motifs placed around the dial set up a mesmerising parallel between human labour and the productivity of nature. Just as a sewing machine fixes thread into cloth and builds a structure, so these small arthropods of the natural world stitch the ecological cloth and hold the fabric of the universe together. A flower, a feather, a beetle, a small four-legged animal and splashes of magenta are spread across the same camel-coloured, micro-blasted ground; “Sin Ti Nunca” is printed at six o’clock, Franck Muller at twelve.
format_quote"Just as a sewing machine fixes thread into cloth and builds a structure, so these small arthropods stitch the ecological cloth and hold the fabric of the universe together."
Hasan Bekmezci
The Ancient Master of the East, in his writings, sets down his astonishment, and then his understanding, before the flies, the insects and the small creatures that are created as such flawless works of art, that carry enormous aesthetic and biological projects upon them, that are nevertheless crushed underfoot without effort and whose lives are extremely short. At first he sees the ease with which these micro beings, created so ornately and so artfully, are lost and die away as a waste beyond the reach of reason; but when he grasps the truth of it he understands that it rests on a great wisdom.
The lives of these small creatures are short and their reproduction is on an enormous scale, because they are not permanent individuals but the passing marvels of an exhibition of divine art that is renewed without pause. In the palace of the universe the Creator gives them their duty on that stage so that wholly new works may be shown at every moment. Their quick death is not a lack of worth; it is the pages of the book of life being turned so fast that they announce, in a language always fresh, how great the artist is whose hand made them.
When an artist finishes a work laboured over down to its finest detail, a deep satisfaction and an aesthetic pleasure rise in the soul. The Creator of the universe likewise, while making that flawless optical pattern on the wing of every fly and the gilded armour on the backs of beetles, beholds in these micro mirrors a sacred and endless beauty of His own, a pure love of art, and a divine pleasure. We cannot fully reason our way to that divine pleasure; but from the flawlessness of the work we feel the splendour of that sacred satisfaction.
format_quote"Their quick death is not a lack of worth; it is the pages of the book of life being turned fast enough to announce how great the artist is whose hand made them."
Hasan Bekmezci
The art of Amador Montes takes its roots from the ancient popular culture of Mexico, from a folkloric memory that smells of earth, and from a collective consciousness. The phrase “Sin Ti Nunca”, never without you, which also gave its name to the artist’s retrospective book, is a poetic and shattering statement that a human being cannot live cut off from nature, from his roots, and from the balance those small creatures provide. Montes works in Oaxaca, with more than twenty-five years of work behind him and over a hundred and thirty exhibitions across the Americas, Europe and Asia.
As modern man pushed nature out of his life and built cages of concrete, he also mechanised time and drained the soul from it. The partnership of Amador Montes and Franck Muller defies that soulless rupture by giving the watch something very close to a living character. The plant motifs, the sewing machines and the detailed insect illustrations that adorn the dial bring the warm earthen memory of Mexico together with the high craft of Geneva watchmaking, on a flawless bridge.
The case keeps the unmistakable tonneau silhouette of the Vanguard and is cut from a single block of 18K rose gold or steel; there are four versions, 41 mm in steel limited to thirty pieces, 41 mm in rose gold to ten, 35 mm in steel to ten and 35 mm in rose gold to ten. At its heart turns Franck Muller’s own automatic calibre, drawing its energy from the movement of the wrist.
The Franck Muller x Amador Montes Vanguard Slim “Sin Ti Nunca” is more than an ordinary luxury object carried on the wrist; it is a living manifesto that brings horology together with the evolutionary depth of biology, with the vital balance of the ecological chain, with the wisdom of divine art in those short-lived creatures as we see it through the window of the Ancient Master of the East, and with the flawless order in creation.
Sin Ti Nunca. Without nature, without our roots, and without the balance those small and wonderful creatures provide, never.
The watch in its maker’s own words: Franck Muller, the Vanguard Slim Amador Montes