Richard Mille invites French graffiti artist Kongo to work his magic on the RM 68-01 Tourbillon, making it the very first time contemporary artwork has been integrated into the inner workings of a watch.
From the infinitely large to the infinitesimally small, French graffiti artist Cyril Phan, aka Kongo, translates his street mural aesthetic to a micro scale, bringing his special brand of joyful graffiti art to the heart of a watch movement. For someone used to painting on walls and large surfaces, turning his canvas to the horological world of micromechanics and precision has proved to be a considerable challenge. But Richard Mille, being the visionary that he is, was prepared to take a gamble on him, and open the world of haute horlogerie to contemporary art. The result is an undeniable success, both visually and technically: the RM 68-01 Tourbillon Cyril Kongo features an explosion of airbrushed, rainbow-like hues over the watch’s skeletonized dial and caliber. The self-taught artist with three decades of experience decorated both sides of the tourbillon movement—covering everything from the baseplate, bridges, wheels, flange, and sapphire crystal dial in his signature style—marking a first in watchmaking. In the process of miniaturizing his work, he has elevated the timepiece to fine art.
The initial meeting between Mille and Kongo occurred two years ago at an informal dinner organized by Jean-Noël Robert of Airbus, when Kongo was ignorant about the world of fine watches and didn’t have a clue who Richard Mille was. Then Mille visited Kongo’s exhibition at Galerie Matignon in Paris 10 days later; only two weeks after that, he asked the artist to collaborate on a timepiece. Although Kongo originally believed he would be painting the watch dial, Mille wanted him to attack the movement.
“It was very simple,” Kongo recalls. “It was a meeting of human beings rather than companies. I met Richard Mille the man, not the brand. In the meantime, I saw the work he was doing. Of course I said yes, and that’s how it started. Then when we began to develop the project, he challenged me directly. He said, ‘Look, we’re going to do something that has never been done before in watchmaking, i.e. painting a movement, and I want to see the work of Kongo.’ For me, doing graffiti on walls of three meters by two, minimum, or building facades—to work on the infinitely small was an incredible challenge. Once I took on the challenge, I was very troubled, because how was I going to create a signature artwork on such a small object?”
Haute horlogerie movement-maker Renaud & Papi sent its head of decoration, Laurent Paros, to Kongo’s messy atelier in Bagnolet, on the outskirts of Paris. After two days of experimenting with exceptionally fine airbrushes, they quickly realized they wouldn’t be able to work with the tools readily available on the market. “Then I went to Switzerland,” says Kongo. “Arriving at Renaud & Papi, I found a very sanitized company with airlocks and dust vacuums, everyone in anti-static coats, all working with gloves, microscopes, loupes. In the end, graffiti and watchmaking are somewhat polar opposites. We were impressed by each other’s work, but the only point we had in common was Richard Mille’s desire to collaborate with me. For Renaud & Papi, it was a real conundrum. Technically it could be done, but now we had to find a paint that could stand the test of time, didn’t flake, wasn’t too heavy; and a way to make the letters tiny while maintaining my style.”
Coming up with the design was straightforward, but transferring his work from the streets to a watch movement was extremely complicated; even a thin layer of paint would affect the caliber’s equilibrium, since each component is finely calibrated for precise operation. He had to be able to put lettering directly on parts only a few millimeters long and a fraction of a millimeter thick. It took more than a year to develop the painting technique for a timepiece measuring five square centimeters, and to create unique tools for protection so the gears wouldn’t get paint on them and special tweezers for handling parts without touching them. Renaud & Papi and Kongo sought out tricks to have the airbrush emit the minimum amount of paint while providing satisfactory graphic work that resembled one of his artworks. In the end, he used airbrushes with practically no air inside and the finest needles found on the market, which enabled him to spray his colors on everything from the baseplate to the wheels with extreme delicacy, just one drop at a time.
A never-before-seen palette of indelible paints was created that adhered entirely to the titanium components and could withstand assembly and disassembly; the weight of the paint had to be strictly defined beforehand. Microscopic letter stencils had to be cut from extra-thin metal sheets to allow the execution of designs barely visible to the naked eye and impossible to do directly by hand, while certain motifs were drawn with the help of pens with particularly fine nibs. Practically all parts of the watch are enveloped in color, and Kongo’s work is visible from all viewing angles. Just as Mille desired, he appropriated the watch, pushed the boundaries of watchmaking technique, and even went beyond his own limits through extremely precise and painstaking hand-painted work. Traveling to Switzerland approximately 10 times for the project, he worked in batches of five movements at a time, staying a week on every trip. A slow process, it took him nearly a day to paint one caliber while wearing an eyeglass loupe.
“The first watches were, of course, more difficult to achieve and less fine than the last,” he describes. “Towards the end, I was more at ease technically. I was able to put in more work. No two watches are alike. Also for my signature, I had to write everything by hand, but I’m not at all used to signing so small. We found small pens and I had to recreate my same signature as on the street. I had to tag on sapphire crystal, which is expensive and fragile, so there was a lot of loss. I worked at such a close distance that I must have lost one-fifth of my vision in each eye!”
The entire time-only skeletonized manual-winding Caliber RM 68-01 in microblasted grade 5 titanium and the asymmetrical case were thought through and developed to form an ensemble that was both creative and coherent. On the back of the watch, the central shape of the movement baseplate evokes a splash of paint against a wall, while the bridges curving in different directions on the front suggest uncontrolled brushstrokes. The design of the case, with a NTPT carbon caseband and lightweight, scratch-resistant TZP black ceramic bezel and caseback, narrows in two directions: in thickness from nine to three o’clock and in height between 12 and six o’clock. Each timepiece from this extremely limited series of 30 worldwide was worked on individually by Kongo, making them all unique pieces, true works of art that could be displayed alongside his canvases. He notes, “You could compare these 30 pieces to paintings for a show on a theme, so we could put them in a gallery, exhibit them, and have them tour together. It would be an exhibition that really made sense.” Launched in June, the watch comes on a rubber or Velcro strap, and retails for $800,000.
When asked about the values he shares with Mille, Kongo replies, “Richard is a great man, a visionary, very daring. Beyond a successful brand, he’s profoundly human, and I have learned a lot from him. I have an incredible opportunity to be part of this family. It’s a small brand, and Richard is the patriarch, but he’s not the boss that you never see. He pays attention to all points, to his babies, to his employees, and is very respectful. He’s a workaholic. Rather than talking about shared values, he is someone who I really like and who inspires me a lot. I’m lucky at my age to have met someone like him and to work on a project together, because it allows me to project myself, to have a methodology, to have even more confidence in myself and to say that everything is possible. The watch has been very well received by collectors. Now, will there be further collaborations? I would like that very much, because today I’ve mastered a technique that no one else in the watchmaking industry has mastered, or even in the world of painting. We were the first, the pioneers, in this. It was a superb adventure and I will continue to follow the Richard Mille family.”
Although Kongo doesn’t usually wear a timepiece, he insists that he will sport his Richard Mille proudly (he asked for special modifications for his own watch) to represent the brand once he receives it. He concludes, “It’s an incredible opportunity to be able to walk around with one’s paintings on one’s wrist.” —Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle
