“The difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad.” It’s not too much of a surprise Salvador Dali had to come up with a pithy response around his ‘paranoiac-critical method’. The idea of deliberately causing hallucinations for your art smacks of more than a little madness. He wanted to allow his brain to form links between things that the rational mind would not conceive, deliriously associating disparate objects or concepts.
If that all sounds a bit much, this was surrealism and surrealism revelled in the strange. For them, dropping mescaline was a perfectly fitting way to create art – and it worked. In 1931, the results of Dali’s method presented themselves in one of the most famous works of art ever created: The Persistence of Memory.
The Persistence of Memory
Even if you don’t know the name, you know the painting, with its melting clocks. As a work, it’s easy to extrapolate themes from, perceptions of time, the surrealist collapse of established order or, in the artists own words, a camembert melting in the sun. No matter your own interpretation, it’s a fascinating piece and one that has inspired generations of creatives from its home at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
So, why does this all matter? Other than the link between surrealism and watches that The Persistence of Memory represents, of course. Well, that’s because one watch brand has decided to interpret the ambiguous work very, very literally: Exaequo. Exaequo does one thing and one thing only, a physical interpretation of Dali’s melting watches dubbed, intuitively, the Melting Watch. This isn’t just ‘inspired’ by surrealism; the case has been rendered to that it looks like a round watch that’s been pinched in the middle, squashed into some approximation of a figure of eight. There’s nothing else quite like it on the market – and the dial takes things even further.
Exaequo has opted for Roman numerals, with the numbers themselves expanding into their space between the railway minute track and the lower, stepped down centre of the dial. That means they go from, larger at 12 and six o’clock to tiny and cramped at three o’clock and nine. Even that railway minute track around the edge of the two-level dial fits in a show of serious dedication to that surrealist theme.
The Melting Watch is available in a few colourways. Firstly, the case is available in steel or gold PVD. The gold is definitely a striking option, but I only really like PVD on a sports watch personally. Sure, it’s unique, but the Melting Watch is ostensibly a dress piece, so a proper gold case wouldn’t risk damage. It would however jump the price up hugely and accessibility, as we’ll get onto, is a good part of Exaequo.
Dial-wise you’re looking at the usual suspects: black, silver, blue and green, with a funky yellow dial rounding things off with a twist. The green version has gold numerals in the PVD case, silver numerals in the steel, but the rest are the same between models. It’s a solid selection, but I would have liked to see it with Arabic numerals as an option. After all, the watches in The Persistence of Memory have them, and that’s a large part of the inspiration here.
Obviously, this isn’t the first weirdly asymmetrical watch to ever be built; the Cartier Crash is a grail watch that most collectors would drop more than mescaline for. But where that haute horology rarity often achieves eye-watering auction prices, Exaequo offers their slice of surrealist madness for a fraction of the price – fitting given the name translates to ‘on equal footing.’
That’s largely due to the movement more than anything else, which is an ever-reliable quartz number, the Ronda 751-1. Sure, I’d like to see something like this with an automatic, but given the unique case shape, that’s easier said than done. Quartz can be smaller and slimmer at this price point, making sure that the curvaceous case doesn’t balloon to a weirdly inflated size.
This isn’t high watchmaking, far from it in fact. The stainless-steel version will set you back CHF 520, around £465, with the PVD version a tiny increase on that. But for the artistically inclined this is a fantastic, accessible and inspired take on surrealism made real. If someone told me that someone was going to create a melting watch based on Dali, I’d have probably called him a madman. The difference, it turns out, is that he’s not mad. Here’s hoping that not-madness extends to automatics in the future.
Price and Specs:
More details at Exaequo.
