The Elypse: sidereal silence
In watchmaking, the oval form is still used relatively rarely. For the
past two years, Guy Ellia, an independent designer, has captured the power and the force of this primordial geometrid shape. Here it is today, fully matured, totally revealed.
Fractal in this year's collection, the Elypse is to the egg the beginning or the first of volumes. Feminine, almost round, but not really that either, it is also the expression of the earth's elliptical course around the sun.
This volume that one might think simple is in fact extremely complex, especially if the oval is pinched at its extremity to maximise the aesthetic effect and espouse the wrist's anatomy.
Thus, the watches in the collection, under their apparent restraint,
reveal none of the invisible internal tensions that are created during
their manufacture. Manage to dominate the forces of noble metal so
that it adopts the desired form is what sets true creators apart. In
this respect, Guy Ellia has nothing more to prove. He is today
renowned and recognised for his incomparable mastery of volumes in watchmaking, as for his audacious settings for jewellery.
The tamer, in a sense, of rare materials, he knows how to respect
them and still get the best out of them. By slightly pinching the
cases of these models which house quartz movements manufactured by the Frédéric Piguet Manufacture, he has managed to ensure that the light never catches the gold uniformly. The material's gleam is made more intense as it moves and the brilliance of the gems is more powerful. You had to be a jeweller to think of a watch as a volume purely designed to catch and then clothe itself in the light's rays.
In the universe of Guy Ellia, nothing is left up to chance. Precision is
an everyday evidence even if the image that the artists project often
combines a high degree of detachment with an extraordinary
casualness… It is, where the simplicity of these models is concerned, purely an impression.
The interplay of optical illusions, as with a telescope lens, is also the convergence of images towards a centre. The hands here are the catalysts of the numerals on the dial. Radiating as by magic across the entire convex surface, they seem to emanate from a point of origin only to dissipate at the periphery. In this, they merely follow the principle of the expansion of the universe and reveal, in their own way, just as the earth's perihelion is reflected in the volume of the watch, the short and long moments of life itself … There are no meaningless allusions for Guy Ellia, especially when transforming into streamlined forms certain principles that are useful for a physical understanding the world.
Time Square
