Enigmatic, poetic… Trilobe depicts the passing hours in a most original way; a reminder, perhaps, that time is the ultimate luxury. The brand likes to associate its watches with artists, works or movements that were gamechangers in their day. Its Nuit Fantastique collection originated from the desire – need? – to disrupt the norm and question time, through an original display composed of two rings and an aperture showing hours, minutes and seconds, driven by the X-Centric calibre. Art brut, a term coined by Jean Dubuffet and first used in a 1945 manifesto, refers to the work of artists with no formal training, whose production sits outside the boundaries of convention and is free from traditional influences. The two were destined to meet.
Darkness and light
Jean Dubuffet and Trilobe have no issue with contrasts or, for that matter, oxymorons. In the Nuit Fantastique Ombre (shadow) edition and Lumière (light) edition, light comes out of darkness in the same way Dubuffet juxtaposed colours as a means of producing light out of shadow. Light from shadow, shadow cast in light, light wrapped in darkness… conventions are altered, the imagination set free, nothing is impossible.
It takes a complementary duo for a nuit to be truly fantastique. Black and white combine, alternate, balance each other on Nuit Fantastique's characteristic dial whose different forms, accentuated by these contrasts, appear more natural than ever.
The power of words
This is not the only common ground between watchmaker Trilobe and writer and artist Dubuffet, who believed it was "as much the artist's role to create images as to name them." By giving its collections and watches names inspired by art and literature, Trilobe plants seeds for us to imagine fresh connections between its watches, its original conception of time, and art.
When Trilobe launched its Nuit Fantastique collection in 2021, it alluded to Stefan Zweig's short story Fantastic Night, which "encourages us to let excitement into our lives and experience things in a different way," as Gautier Massoneau, Trilobe's founder, explained in a conversation about the brand's literary and artistic references. This inspiration appears as a dial without hands that offers an alternate vision of time. On the Ombre and Lumière editions, the pronounced contrasts in no way detract from the sober elegance of a watch whose curved geometry underlies a flowing, timeless aesthetic.
Changing the way we do things changes the way we see.
