De Bethune Dream Watch 5.2

With the Dream Watch 5.2, De Bethune creates a fascinating work that it is placing like a landmark on the frontier between art and watchmaking.

Exploring the past so as to effectively reinterpret it, discovering its legacy, pushing its limits and then invent the future. Mastering conventions to the point where one can break entirely free of them in order to transform expertise into emotions and techniques into sheer beauty. For David Zanetta and Denis Flageollet, this approach applies as much to art as to watchmaking, and the Dream Watch 5.2 indeed belongs to these two worlds; it speaks of space, of movement and of speed, as well as of precision and horological complications.

In creating this model, David Zanetta and Denis Flageollet escaped the confines of conventional scales and proportions. They imagined a wrist-size sculpture and reduced it to the stature of a precious stone, which they have set on the cambered back of their timepiece. The Dream Watch 5.2 is a testament to the vision shared by the two men and to their unbridled creativity, based on understanding and respect for the great master-watchmakers of the past – whose work they both transcend and exalt.

Together, they ensure that De Bethune watches pursue an entirely consistent path, embodying 21st century watchmaking at its most timeless – and of which the Dream Watch collection is the ultimate and most accomplished expression.

The unusual design of the Dream Watch 5.2 owes a great deal to its predecessors, from which it reprises certain design codes while paring them down to essentials. Its lines carry a hint of the distinctive bridge on Dream Watch 1 – the domed deltoid shape that is the aesthetic signature of the Manufacture based in L’Auberson. It also evokes the case of the Dream Watch 4, which conveys the same tension between edgy design and gentle curves.

Dream Watch 5.2 stems from constant research into shapes, colours and materials. It now takes on a coat of blackened zirconium – a light and rugged metal with a black oxidised shade that is just as impervious to the effects of air and water as this timepiece is to the passing of time… Because this watch is first and foremost an artwork.

The extreme miniaturisation of its mechanism is now entirely dedicated to serving design, a field in which time is just one element among others. Representing a typical De Bethune interpretation, like a nod or a signature, a small two-tone sphere indicates the moon phases. Made of two assembled and polished half-spheres in flame-blued steel and palladium, it guides the eye towards the minimalist, digital display of the hours and minutes… and then a little further to the cabochon-cut sapphire adorning the crown.