The Attachment

Among Konstantin Chaykin's recent artworks, ‘Attachment’ stands out for an unusual premise: it takes as its subject not a movement but a feeling. Here, a human emotion becomes a Horological Archetype in its own right. The artwork explores the peculiar equilibrium that holds two people together, the capacity to bear a relationship's strain without letting it snap. It belongs to a wider preoccupation running through the artist's work, what might be called his visual philosophy of time, in which intangible states of the human heart, attachment, memory, longing, fate, are rendered, one by one, in the vocabulary of Horological Art, each finding its own mechanical metaphor.

For ‘Attachment’, Chaykin settled on the fusee and chain, the ingenious eighteenth century solution watchmakers devised to even out the pull of a mainspring as it winds down. In this modest piece of Haute Horology he found an unlikely counterpart to human bonds: much as the chain balances the tension between barrel and fusee, smoothing out the spring's uneven pull, attachment holds two people in equilibrium, absorbing the friction between them. The result is what might be termed Chaykin's inventive translation, whereby a component built to solve a mechanical problem quietly takes on the work of a feeling.