Charlie Paris x L’Atlas: An Exclusive Collaboration
Through his collaboration with Charlie Paris, L’Atlas brings watchmaking and art together through a shared exploration of time. The dial becomes a canvas for his circular cryptograms, symbols that blur the boundaries between writing and form. In this interview, the artist looks back on how the collaboration came about and discusses his desire to transform an everyday object into a space for contemplation.
1) How did this collaboration come about? How did you envision this collection together?
L’Atlas: The collaboration grew out of the meeting of two different ways of thinking about time. Watchmaking measures it, while art seeks instead to suspend it, stretch it out or give it another form.
I was immediately drawn to the dial as an almost symbolic space: a circle in which time turns, returns, disappears and begins again. I chose to inscribe one of my circular cryptograms on it, a kind of language without an alphabet, a form of writing that can be observed without necessarily being deciphered.
The idea was to create an object that does more than simply tell the time, but also opens up a space for contemplation.
2) What made you want to take part in this project?
L’Atlas: What drew me to it was the paradox of the watch: it is an object designed to measure time, even though no one can truly possess it.
We look at the time to understand where we stand in it, yet every moment we observe is already disappearing. I found it interesting to bring my work into this object because my cryptograms also speak to a certain kind of time: the time of reading, perception and interpretation.
The watch then becomes a small architecture of time that we carry with us.
3) How did you adapt your visual language to the world of watchmaking while remaining true to your artistic approach?
L’Atlas: I didn’t really try to adapt my visual language. Instead, I tried to listen to what the medium itself had to say.
The circular dial naturally echoed my round cryptograms. I see it as a primitive and universal form: the circle as a cycle, as perpetual motion, as a space with neither beginning nor end.
My work often involves transforming signs into forms and forms into signs. With this watch, the process was almost reversed: the sign comes to inhabit an object whose very purpose is to give meaning to the movement of time.
The cryptogram remains deliberately indecipherable. It can be read, but not necessarily understood. And perhaps that is precisely where poetry begins.
4) What do you look for in a collaboration?
L’Atlas: I look for an encounter that shifts perspectives.
For me, a good collaboration is not about simply bringing two worlds together. It should allow each party to step slightly outside its own territory and discover something it would never have found alone.
I like the idea of an object becoming the meeting point for these worlds: between material and idea, function and poetry, what we recognize and what we have yet to understand. For example, if you look at the hands of the watch, you’ll notice that they were stamped from the utility knife blades I use to cut my adhesive lettering in the studio.
5) What would you like people to take away from this collection?
L’Atlas: Above all, I would like a feeling to linger.
I would like people to look at the watch to tell the time, then forget for a moment to read it. For the dial to become something else: a shape, a sign, a silent language.
My cryptograms are forms of writing that do not reveal their meaning immediately. They call for a certain kind of attention, and sometimes, for time. Perhaps this watch is a way of bringing these two things together: the time we measure and the time we take to look.
Ultimately, I would like everyone to be able to project their own story onto it. Because a sign never quite means the same thing to the person looking at it.
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