Le Temps Opposé®
turns back time.
Never still, Gilles Robert went delving into his collection of horological curios and came out with an original Robert movement: a manual-winding calibre made in the 1950s at Robert & Cie. by Maurice and Denis Robert, the ninth and tenth generations. In its day, this historic movement had been the world’s smallest round calibre with centre seconds. An idea planted itself in Gilles Robert’s mind. Where he would take it, no-one had expected.
Not a relic of the past;
a beginning.
In 2012 he added a complication of his own invention that would turn time upside down — literally and symbolically. The movement could now be fitted back-to-front in the case, revealing on the dial side what, ordinarily, remains hidden. Hours and minutes were about-turned to resume their habitual course but seconds, red-tinged and defiant, continue their backward motion. Time shown is still the correct time but its logic, upended, confounds.
The meaning
of time.
Twelve years of patient adjustments separated the first pencil strokes from the object in material form, shaped by the ancestral skills of 55 artisans. Heir to 11 generations of watchmakers, Le Temps Opposé is proud of its lineage though not afraid to be the wayward child. Every detail hums with intent from which mechanisms, forms and meaning unfold. To stunning effect! They question the course of time, its direction, its measuring, its meaning. Answers overlap, contradict each other, vanish and it is perhaps here, in these interstices, that the truth resides.
