Two rarely-seen stones lend the Automatique character and intrigue.
We aim to create modern interpretations of memories, people, places, and emotions that live in our subconscious.
Pierre Biver Co-Founder & Creative Director
One of the joys of working with natural materials is the opportunity to encounter the unexpected. Mother nature does not deliver the same thing every time. While watchmakers typically like everything standardized and under control, this unpredictability offers moments of inspiration and creative sparks that cannot be found anywhere else.
This is one of the reasons we take so much pleasure in creating dials from naturally occurring hard stones. The myriad colors, structures, and textures breathe life into our timepieces in a special way – as evidenced by the Pietersite and Obsidian dials presented on the very first Automatique Atelier Series watches last year. Two recent additions to the collection further this line of thinking, bringing warm tones and intricate textures to the Automatique with a pair of unusual, rarely-seen stones: Oeil de Fer and Mahogany Obsidian.
The Automatique Oeil de Fer is an exercise in contrasts. The case is made from 18k yellow gold, which is about as classic as you can get in fine watchmaking, while the dial presents a fiery flash of yellows, oranges, and reds set against a fine brown and black background. Oeil de Fer is a compound stone, occurring when hematite, red jasper, and tiger’s eye mix and fuse together over millions of years. It is rarely seen in watchmaking, though its very existence is evidence of the passage of time and the mysteries of fate. In this way, it is a natural fit.
“We aim to create modern interpretations of memories, people, places, and emotions that live in our subconscious,” says co-founder and creative director Pierre Biver. “What unites the various dial treatments in this collection is this shared philosophy. It’s the interaction, the dialogue between the idea and the execution, that makes each one special in its own way.”
Sitting alongside the Automatique Oeil de Fer is the Automatique Mahogany Obsidian, which pairs an 18k rose gold case with the swirling red, amber, and black colors of the namesake stone. With a high polish that allows it to gently reflect the rose gold hands as they glide over its surface, the dial almost appears to contain a roiling flame inside, with a pronounced three-dimensional effect and colors that sometimes appear subtle and sometimes announce themselves boldly. This is fitting for a stone that is literally forged in volcanos.
Side by side, these two timepieces play off one another quite nicely. The warm tones harmonize, though each brings something unique to the table, with different grain structures, surface textures, and colors. The two stones’ cultural associations with feelings of strength and protection make them a natural pair, too. Together, the Automatique Oeil de Fer and Mahogany Obsidian harness a kind of beauty that can only come from nature to tell a powerful story older than human timekeeping itself.
