With the Promenade collection, Czapek introduced the finest examples of guilloché and enamel art at Watches & Wonders 2024.
Some watches remind me books. For instance, I remember a sentence from In Search of Lost Time: “An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.”
Some brands don’t need centuries to be excellent. Founded in 2012 to honor the memory and work of François Czapek, and introduced its first watch in 2015, Czapek is good example. The brand has done many things shortly: It launched four collections in less than ten years. And this year, it launched its fifth collection, Promenade. Let’s hand it to Rolex, but Czapek presented perhaps the most beautiful examples of guilloché and enamel art at Watches & Wonders 2024.
Models with guilloche are perfect examples, but the thing is Goutte d’Eau watch that designed in corporate with Donzé Cadrans. The Goutte d’Eau, which will be produced only 100 pieces because of difficulty of enameling, is a slim, plain, elegant, lively and graceful watch in 38 mm. There is a complicated movement behind the simple beauty of the dial. The movement is also designed specifically for those who are interested in the beauty of movements and micro-rotors.
Asymmetrical dial designs have a distinctive charm. Fine art enthusiasts may look for symmetry in watches, but the aura emanating from Czapek’s hypnotizing small seconds sub-dial, which combines the ripples of raindrops on the surface of water and the vibration of time, perhaps says something more alluring than Marcel Proust’s sentences:
“But human get dizzy when looking at this loose, beautiful sky, which didn’t deign to adjust its clocks, which continued to lazily spread the blue hues of the lingering daylight over the lit city; the sky turned into blue glaciers rising step by step, whilst it was a flat sea. The Trocadero towers, which seemed to be right next to the cyan steps, would be so far away, just like the double towers in some Swiss towns, which from a distance seemed to be side by side with the slopes of high mountains.”
