t all began with a refusal. “For a year, he wouldn’t agree to meet me,” recalls Alto CEO Thibaud Guittard. “Eventually, he accepted, telling me: I’ll see you out of courtesy, but I refuse any collaboration.” Bernar Venet was known for only one venture of this kind, a celebrated high-speed artwork created with Bugatti. But here, the scale was entirely different. The paradox was obvious: how do you transpose onto the wrist the work of an artist whose visual language is rooted in gigantism, gravity and collapse?

Then, within days, the chemistry of the encounter took hold and everything changed. “We suggested the idea of moving from the monumental to the intimate. You can’t walk around carrying a Venet sculpture… but perhaps you can wear one,” continues Guittard, who founded Alto five years ago as an artistic manifesto in watchmaking. The discussion soon expanded to creative processes, the monochrome aesthetic so central to the artist’s work, the choice of material – a crucial point – and a visual language reduced to its purest expression.

For Alto Creative Director Raphaël Abeillon, once the project was underway, the collaboration “developed very naturally”. The challenge was to strike a balance between two worlds without ever betraying the original work. “I would send him a composition, we would discuss it, but there was never any friction. Our objective was clear and shared: remain faithful to his language.”

Bernar Venet

The challenge was as technical as it was conceptual. How do you suggest, within just a few centimetres, the volumetric power of Venet’s arcs and structures? The artist notably created Europe’s tallest metal sculpture, Arc Majeur, inaugurated in 2019 and composed of two arcs measuring 20 and 60 metres that span the motorway near La Louvière in Belgium – a defining expression of his fascination with monumentality. “The complexity obviously lay in the miniaturisation, in conveying this spectacular sense of volume within such a confined space,” explains Raphaël Abeillon.

A living material

To achieve this, material became central to the project. Using Venet’s signature Corten steel was impossible: too unstable, magnetic and unsuitable for watchmaking. Alto therefore developed a bespoke bronze alloy with a partner based in La Chaux-de-Fonds.

“We worked in a laboratory to find the right alloy, capable of evoking his steel without its constraints,” says Raphaël Abeillon. Around twenty patina samples were tested, supported by ageing protocols and the expertise of the Metallo-Tests laboratory.

The final result is not merely a surface treatment. “It’s not PVD, but a stabilised bronze that will continue to evolve.” Like Venet’s sculptures, the watch changes over time. Depending on its environment, each piece will develop a unique patina. “At the launch event, some watches had already evolved differently after just two or three months.”

The piece was unveiled at Le Muy estate, in France’s Var region, where the artist – whose unmistakable accent still carries the warmth of Provence – has been based since the late 1980s. There, he created his vast estate and foundation, home to his monumental works as well as those of other leading contemporary artists, in an environment at once natural and spectacular, entirely aligned with his artistic universe.

Venet’s legacy: accumulation and gravity

Bernar Venet’s universe permeates the project throughout. Thibaud Guittard recalls: “In 1964, at the age of 22, he created Le Tas de charbon, introducing the notion of accumulation, later adopted by thousands of artists.” Then came the monumental arcs, gravity-bound structures and staged collapses.

“His art is monossemic: what he shows us is exactly what we see,” he continues. An apparent simplicity that nonetheless leaves room for profound subjectivity. This philosophy is reflected in the Alto watch itself: a radical yet highly legible piece in which material and form speak for themselves, without narrative excess.

Before Alto, Bernar Venet had undertaken only one collaboration of this kind. It was with Bugatti in 2012: a Grand Sport transformed into a work of art, featuring the mathematical formulas used by the brand’s engineers, unveiled in Miami during Art Basel.

More than a limited edition, this collaboration lays the foundations for a broader strategy Alto intends to develop – an exceptional first chapter in a series of future projects. Yet while many artistic collaborations in watchmaking are effectively posthumous tributes to long-deceased creators, Alto intends to work exclusively with living contemporary artists. “Direct dialogue with the artist himself is essential.”

Raphaël Abeillon and Thibaud Guittard

This inaugural collaboration forms part of a wider vision that has existed since Alto’s inception: turning watchmaking into a platform for contemporary artistic expression, much as certain brands have done through sport. “What others do with athletes, we do with artists,” summarises Thibaud Guittard.

A way of opening a reflection on time and material. For many today, has watchmaking not itself become a form of art? One can only look forward to what comes next.