Created using freehand spray painting, this mural by BustArt illustrates the inroads watchmaking has made into popular culture, cinema, comic strips and animated film. Although it was designed for Le Locle, there is something Californian about this mural painted on the 1980s mini-skyscraper. It has a touch of Hollywood or the Walt Disney Studios about it.

Time is a mystery that nourishes our imagination from childhood. The lower part of the mural features the inventor Gyro Gearloose, created in 1952 by Carl Barks for the Walt Disney Studios, and Cogsworth, the clock that first appeared in the animated film Beauty and the Beast in 1991.

The charmer checking his watch was inspired by the poster for the film Back to the Future released in 1985. However, BustArt preferred to replace the face of Marty McFly, the hero of the Robert Zemeckis movie, with that of the kind of model who embodied archetypal masculinity in advertisements for watch brands during the so-called golden years following the Second World War, a period of strong economic growth and higher living standards enjoyed by the large majority of developed countries between 1945 and 1975.

Whether they are kitsch or vintage, all these characters bring back memories of our youth and remind us of other whimsical creatures connected with the notion of passing time. The pumpkin coach in Cinderella is a metaphor for something inescapable, while in the tale of Alice in Wonderland, the white rabbit embodies the stress induced by measuring time.

Paradoxically, BustArt pays homage to icons of popular culture by tearing them apart, crumpling them up and even merging them together, a fate to which he has also subjected the Smurfs, characters created by Pierre Culliford, alias Peyo. While BustArt’s approach, which consists of reappropriating other people’s creations, might appear both iconoclastic and opportunistic, it primarily reflects a general tendency that the art world cannot escape: it appears a necessity to recycle codes and ideas. The appropriation and free availability of a globalised cultural heritage are claimed as rights linked to freedom of expression.

Of the large murals I’ve done so far, this is the most detailed.  BustArt (juillet 2021)

«The area of Le Locle is renowned for its famous watchmakers. The watch companies are known and respected around the world for their high standards and precision, and have put Switzerland on the map for representing exactly those values. In my mural “Time Out”, I highlight the precise and complicated gears of a watch. As in life itself, it’s the gears in the background that make the outside work. We often take the end result as it is and for the most part never see the process it took to get there.»    BustArt (July 2021)