Why are watch brands so drawn to working with artists?

'What I didn’t want to do was one of those collaborations where it’s just a matter of putting another name on the dial,' says Thibaut Guittard. 'For me a collaboration with an artist really has to make sense. If it’s going to be a piece of art in its own right, it has to be meaningful.'

Guittard, one time marketing manager for Audemars Pigeut in France, is the founder of Alto, launched three years ago and the only brand established to create watches specifically in collaboration with artists. Its first collaborative watch, just launched, is with the French contemporary sculptor Bernar Venet, known for his monumental, mathematically-precise pieces in Cor-Ten steel.

Its point of difference? The one-piece dial of the Art 01 - of which only 10 pieces will be made - comprises a micro-sculpture by Venet. The watches don’t make use of Cor-Ten steel - since the resulting magnetic effect would be detrimental to the performance of the movement - but of bronze, patinated in the same way using a process developed in-house by Alto.

The dial is also just 0.8mm deep, enough to register the shifts in light and darkness that Venet’s design requires - 'it’s also the volume aspect of the dial that makes it interesting,' Guittard argues - while keeping the watch’s weight to a minimum, and leaving enough room for movement and hands without the finished watch being too thick.

'It was technically very challenging, but the appeal to Venet was that work at such a small scale was in many ways a different proposition for him, while we look on art as perhaps the second biggest means of collaborative communication after sport,' says Guittard. 'These watches are likely for art lovers first. But since the art world tends to be about excluding people, a project like this is also a way for watch fans to be brought into the art world, to discover the artist.'

Alto is now lining up his next artist collaboration, but will first launch a smaller, thinner skeletonised watch - its second, in-house, 3D dial design - in September. By then it will also have been joined by other watchmakers launching artist collaborations: in August Ressence, for example, releases a watch designed in collaboration with Belgian artist Jules Wittock, who free-hand draws intricate mazes; follow a line from start to finish and it reveals a word.

The dial of Ressence’s Type 9 watch - in an edition of around 80 - will carry one of Wittock’s drawings, across the brand’s signature orbiting discs time display. Only at midnight will the display align to allow the word, written in Super-luminova, to be read in the dark.

'The fact is that a watch collaboration with an artist is always a more interesting thing than a collaboration with a retailer,' Ressence’s found Benoit Mintiens suggests. 'Working with an artist you invariably get something you wouldn’t think to do as a watchmaker, while the artist gets to work on something they wouldn’t normally do either, to work on a much smaller, moving canvas. The result is something different. Many watch collaborations are commercially-driven now. What you still get with an artist is a philosophical dimension to a new design.'

The meeting of these two minds is not always easy to pull off though, Mintiens stresses, not least when 'super-cool artists' fail to understand how their ideas may not be translatable into the parameters of watchmaking. 'It can’t be made at scale, or it would be way to expensive or, you know, they insist that it’s made out of translucent titanium,' Mintiens laughs. 'It can get a bit weird.'

Working with an artist can be a leap of faith, agrees Lewis Heath, founder of British sister brands Anordain and Paulin - 'you’re often not quite sure if an artist’s ideas will really be any good on a watch until you’re at the sampling stage,' he notes. And yet the results do typically stand out, which, in an increasingly crowded market of new watch releases, can be critical.

Paulin recently released watches in collaboration with the multi-disciplinary Glasgow artist John Nicol on a series of dials each hand-painted by him in a vibrant abstract style. Anordain has even worked with the artist Rachel Duckhouse - best known for her etching - on the look not a new dial, but of a new movement, seen through an exhibition caseback. Its next artist collaboration is already underway.

'The best thing about artist collaborations is that the artists tend not to know untying about watches,' says Heath, 'so their ideas don’t come coloured by what’s already out there.'