ROSE DE SHARON


“Everyone asked me, ‘Antoine, why not make your own movement?’ But, I don’t care about that, and I was not in a hurry. My own movement will come, at the right time. It has already existed in my mind’s eye for a long time, but it will not be simply one more movement, however wonderful it might be. No, it will be different, intelligent, beautiful, and reliable. It will be a movement with subtleties unknown up to now, but one that can be easily produced.”
If, most of the time, Antoine Preziuso elaborates his poetic machines based on ETA 2892 calibres, it is for very good reasons. “I use this calibre precisely because I give priority to the movement. There have been millions of these calibres made. It is totally reliable, very robust and, above all, and I repeat above all, it will be reparable in 30, 50, or 80 years! I accord a great deal of importance to the transmission and the perennial nature of what I create. I love, for example, giving new life to ancient movements that have stood the test of time, that I can make live again by transforming them, by giving them new functions, by embellishing them for future generations. The ideas of lasting quality and transmission are really at the centre of my concerns.”

Complex and poetic modules
Perhaps Antoine Preziuso has not yet made his own movement because he is a “builder and constructor of additional modules.” Yes, that he plainly is, and in this regard, he has certainly demonstrated the extent of his talent. We only have to think of his “Hours of the World” module, a watch with multiple time zones whose centre, decorated with a revolving planisphere, indicates instantaneously all the “hours of the world” together without any over-engraving (for example Anchorage, Vladivostok, etc...) in the most poetic way possible. It is a magnificent and instant lesson in geography. Or, we could think of his marvellous Grande Lune, conceived during a moonlit evening, while sitting on a balcony in the Near East, with its systems of automatons, its “sliding hour”, all of which are patented 100 percent Preziuso.
Or, we can also admire his very ingenious and patented system of a rotating bezel that arms the minute repeaters, and thus frees up space in the case. This latest system, that he invented some 15 years ago, has now passed into the public domain, and we are now witnessing a large increase of models made by the large brands, which quickly adopted it.
But Antoine Preziuso does not care about that either. “If the large brands are pouncing on my system, I take that as a sort of homage. I am happy about it,” says the peaceful man whose modesty does him credit.

Personal relations
Last year, Preziuso lived through a difficult period that nearly destroyed his enterprise. A large agent suddenly dropped him, right after the watchmaker had hired a much larger staff, and, contrary to his usual habits, had launched a large-scale production effort in response to this particular agent’s orders. The incident, which could have proved disastrous, brought Preziuzo back “to his natural inclinations.”
“I took everything in hand, as much as possible directly with the boutiques owned by watch enthusiasts around the world. My production is less, but my margins are better. And above all, I have a direct, personal, human, and convivial contact with them. With this type of cocktail, you can make miracles. I have, for example, just entered into South Korea and look at the incredible things we have accomplished in only one week…” And, showing us the avalanche of articles obtained, he adds, “I am also seeing a very important increase, even a real explosion, of my direct sales via the internet. Orders come from everywhere, for direct sales and for stores looking to represent me. As one example, it is through the internet that I have just entered into Uzbekistan. The next step will be the United States, a country where more and more requests are coming from.”




1991 and BIG BEN


Unique Pieces
We can also admire Antoine Preziuso’s recent work at the watch shows that are currently taking place. Before leaving on tour, Preziuso is presenting his “Unique Pieces” collection in Geneva, in the luxurious showrooms of the Four Seasons Les Bergues Hotel, a few steps from his own boutique.
The theme for his new line, Unique Pieces, was chosen to emphasize the particular relationship that he intends to have with his clientele: one creator, one timepiece, made for one person.
Among them, we can discover his 50-mm Big Ben Minute Repeater, as simple and pure as it is impressively large, or his second Big Ben Minute Repeater, with no hands or hour markings whatsoever. It is a tactile “sculpture” on the theme of time, a way of returning to the historic roots of the minute repeater, a watch that was originally designed for the blind.
Another piece that offered a challenge is the new Stardust, decorated with not less than 3,000 diamonds, covering just about every part of the watch, including the movement. Or, we can mention: the new Sienna, a watch with only one hand inspired by the campanile clock in Sienna; the Art of Tourbillon, revisited and corrected; the gold Transworld timepiece sculpted and engraved with the images of the world’s monuments; the very personalized gold Grand Chrono Robusto; the skeleton Time Square; the ‘Rose of Sharon’, constructed around a movement dating back to 1890, and totally reworked, with a perpetual calendar, quarter-hour repeater, and retrograde seconds. A detail that says a lot about the conviviality of the timekeeping art of Antoine Preziuso is that the functions of the correctors of this magnificent piece are engraved on the side of the case… the watch thus becomes its own instruction manual.

Having fun
And, with a little bit of luck, we can also admire his famous Tri-tourbillon, an object that has become the subject of much discussion in the watch world. “These remarks do not matter to me,” shrugs Preziuso, “because, when the timepiece is finished, the whole world will know that by increasing the amplitude, by the resonance effect, I will have succeeded in increasing the watch’s precision. But for now, I am developing the equivalent of a car’s ESP for the watch, a system of anti-blocking in a way. If, in the case that one or two of tourbillons stops accidentally, the watch will continue to work perfectly.”
“In the meantime, I am having a lot of fun,” declares Antoine Preziuso, and that is certainly easy to believe. “I want to put a little magic in my watches, because its wearer must dream,” he says while weighing a piece of meteorite in his hand. And to ‘dream’ in a loud voice, he adds, “It is like with the meteorites in which I sculpt my cases. These objects have fallen from the sky, issued from the Big Bang, and I combine them with my tourbillons…”
The time-space continuum is poetic vertigo.


Source: Europa Star April-May 2006 Magazine Issue