A collaboration between Konstantin Chaykin and Louis Erard has resulted in the launch of what has been described as one of this spring’s most “astonishing” releases.
The two brands have come together to give life to a strange creature: a one-eyed monster with a saw mouth, animated by micro-mechanics, Le Régulateur Louis Erard x Konstantin Chaykin, or the Time-Eater.
Those following the developments on the secondary market and the fate of the most interesting releases by Swiss brands, and not exclusively on the blue chips of the collectors’ market, have probably noticed the unusual situation with the limited releases of regulator watches offered by the Louis Erard brand.
“What’s unusual about them?” Konstantin Chaykin asks.
“Usually, the secondary market prices compensate for the initial mark-up, which brands inevitably include in the price of the watch, but Louis Erard collectors’ releases are sold on the secondary market for prices higher than the original retail ones.”
Some of this work is down to the addition of Manuel Emch to the Louis Erard team, ex-head of the contemporary incarnation of Jaquet Droz.
Manuel Emch has brought to Louis Erard the idea of collaborating with independent watchmakers, designers and even bloggers.
Collabs are a notable trend today, and Emch did at Louis Erard something very similar to what Maximillian Busser did with the Opus line.
Busser’s Opus project was exceptional and allowed independent watchmakers to create both the designs and the movements.
However, the Le Régulateur collab series from Louis Erard is different as the movement is not designed from scratch.
While it would increase the prise significantly, all Louis Erard collabs are also based on the standard Sellita SW266 with a regulator dial.
It’s not even a design collaboration per se, with the term “stylization” being more appropriate, according to the brand. The most successful of such collabs were the models made in partnership with Alain Silberstein, and the one model with Vianney Halter.
However, the Le Régulateur Louis Erard x Konstantin Chaykin, officially introduced on April 25, and unofficially about a month earlier at the AHCI exhibition in Geneve is completely different.
Konstantin Chaykin did not just lend Louis Erard the design of his Joker or other wristmon so they could make a watch as they saw fit, mainly because he didn’t want a trivial “one-eyed joker.”
Instead, the Time-Eater was born.
Firstly, Mr Chaykin was keen to highlight that he agreed to launch the collab due to just how impressive Louis Erard collaborations had been in the past with other watchmakers.
On this, he explained: “In recent years Louis Erard had shown its ability to produce wonderful collaborations. Among the most striking ones are the pieces made with Alain Silberstein and Vianney Halter. I liked the idea of jointly developing a concept, unifying the design of my “Wristmons” collection and the movement with regulator indication which my colleagues from Louis Erard suggested.
Adding: “The work started in late 2020. The first idea was to add some new indication elements. But that would make the movement much more complex and consequently much more expensive. So, I decided to apply the concept to the usual Louis Erard regulator design”.
At this point, Chaykin had already gone beyond the limits of the role in which Louis Erard collaborators usually play and, according to Mr Chayin, he felt that he couldn’t stop there.
The news release explained: “It’s always interesting to meet Chaykin when he’s working on a new project. When nothing is set in stone yet, and he suddenly gets a new idea, even better than the previous one, even though the previous one was already spectacular.
“When he calmly dismisses already seemingly fully developed concept, not because it isn’t working, but because the new idea seems more interesting to work with. His thinking is rarely predictable, so every time things can go differently, in a way not necessarily suggested by all the previous experience.”
One such sudden shift happened during the work on the Time-Eater when Konstantin Chaykin went far beyond the normal limits.
Instead of just making something in the style of his Joker he decided to make a watch with a story and a concept.
This opposes his brand’s usual model of working because he usually only applies himself to this extent to design of the new wristmons, an example visible with the Minions watch.
Chaykin says he approached the concept of the watch known today as the Time-Eater from an unusual perspective. The starting point began with the history of Halloween-themed special releases in the wristmons collection, which began in 2017 when the “Pumpkin Head” was released.
“Every year for Halloween I would make a new monster, a Halloween-themed wristmon: there were, for example, the “Pumpkin Head” and the “Dracula,” reflects Chaykin.
He continues: “Looking for ideas for this collaboration I was thinking about Russian theme, and remembered a classic fairy-tale character, the One-Eyed Likho.”
This is where the idea of making a one-eyed wristmon first came from.
The arrangement of indicators fits perfectly to the Louis Erard collaboration and to preserve the wristmon DNA, he used some elements of the very first Joker.
According to Chaykin, this where it becomes interesting.
Another wristmons tradition, though not as long, involves Chaykin’s ability to not just find associations linking the new character with some cultural notion, but to provide a deeper philosophical meaning.
For example, for the wristmons dedicated to the Chinese New Year, he explores the interlacing of Chinese mythology and images from other cultures, such as European, Greek or American.
This time, for the Louis Erard collaboration he created a previously unheard of amalgam of the traditional regulator dial, his own Joker, the ancestor of all future wristmons, and the Russian myth of a one-eyed monster, and a seemingly very distant character of ancient Greek myths, once imagined by a great Spanish artist too.
Konstantin remembers: “When choosing the design for the ‘mouth’ I decided to address imagery from other cultures. I remembered Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’. I also thought about the langoliers, ‘time eaters’ from the eponymous Stephen King story.
“All this gave the idea for the mouth-second indicator: moving ‘teeth’ in perpetual rotation, devouring time. This also links to the name of the watch: cyclopes (‘round eyes’ in Greek) were the brothers of Chronos, the god of time, the Greek analogue of Saturn.”
But even that was not enough, and he did something he never did with the wristmons collection and added the minute hand.
“I decided to shape the minute hand like two arms spinning in a circle. Since I was thinking about a living character, I designed both sides of it as actual hands, with carefully selected finger poses,” he explains.
Adding: “The pointer had to be arrow-shaped, and the back had to look like the fletching. I drew the figures, one pointing, the other looking like an expressive gesture one might see at a rock concert. But anyone looking at the watch is free to come up with their own interpretation of their meaning.”
Concluding: “Here he is, of course, not quite genuine. He has a great sense of humor and the well-known gesture I refused to name did find its way to the Time-Eater design. Does it scare you? Me – certainly not.”
The dash of rowdiness gives this excellent watch a bit of piquancy and in that sense, only increases its chances of eventually becoming one of the legends of contemporary watchmaking.
