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The Hour Will Come

Canvas ・ Acrylic ・ 40×40 cm

About the artwork

The motif of the wheel of fortune belongs among the enduring images of medieval philosophy: the goddess Fortune turns her wheel, raising some and casting down others, leaving to the human being only the acceptance of this movement's inevitability. A watch movement represents a kindred structure: a system of interdependent rotating wheels obeying a single set order, from which not a single component can be removed without stopping the entire movement. It is precisely this structural kinship, the gear wheel as a distant descendant of the ancient and medieval wheel of fortune, that gave rise to the artwork.

The canvas shows an autonomous watch module: a brass mainplate, steel screws and a pyramidal base locked into a rigid construction, stripped of decorative excess. As in other works by Konstantin Chaykin, this technical assembly acquires character and mood, continuing his series of anthropomorphic modules. The exposed gear with a ruby center serves as Wristmon's signature "eye", drawing the viewer's gaze toward the flow of time, while the spear like lever, frozen at the composition's upper edge, reads as a second hand suspended in the instant before it moves. The title "The Hour Will Come" reads as an allegory of a High Order, a metaphor for the implacable turning of the wheel of fate: when the lever descends, the mechanical warden will remind us that his moment is drawing near.
Universum "Horological Archetypes"
In Haute Horology, an idea is resolved into engineering. In artwork, it remains a living thought, captured in the moment.
Konstantin
Chaykin