Profiles In Time: A Conversation With Romaric André AKA seconde/seconde/

Artists have long used lies to tell the truth. Romaric André, known to the watch world as seconde/seconde/, isn’t here to lie. But he is here to disrupt your expectations of what the truth is and in turn, what a watch can be, and should stand for.

He’s been compared to Banksy. He’s been called a vandal, a disrupter, a visionary. But when we finally connected for an interview, what I found was something more nuanced, something more honest. He’s not a vandal. He’s not a designer, and I would struggle to pigeon hole him with the title of artist. He is a collaborator, which is a loaded word in watch circles today, where collaboration can mean anything from co-signed dials to dial makers teaming up with case makers, or designers working alongside movement manufacturers. But the kind of collaboration seconde/seconde/ represents feels less like a brand merger and more like the graffiti on the F train—disruptive, expressive, and unmistakably deliberate. This isn’t random tagging; this is graffiti with purpose.

He’s a creative who sees the world just a few degrees off-axis—a man who, as he puts it, is “still crafting his journey.”

Romaric André, is a man who put a Zelda sword on a Rolex, scattered indices on a moonphase like a toddler threw them, slipped cartoons into serious horology, and uses more puns than a dad trying to get a laugh at the dinner table. So what drives someone to take watches and give them just enough of a jolt that it turns them into little philosophical grenades?

How It Started

Five years ago, says André, “I was lost.” He was coming off a mobile phone project that wasn’t really going anywhere. That project was Celsius – a project that combined a flip phone with a working tourbillon, which launched in 2009. The phones even attracted the attention of the GPHG, but they cost €250,000, and launched a few years after the iPhone was released making flip phones seem out of date. Celsius went into receivership after making only eight units.

“I tried to enter the industry and it didn’t work out.” He said. “So I thought, what could I do to belong to the watch industry… maybe I can do something a little disrespectful, but not too harmful.” And in a way he decided, as many of us wish to do, to become younger as we grow older. Whether it’s a croissant on a Tiffany & Co dial Patek Philippe or the French cartoon character Asterix showing up on a watch, it’s clear: there’s a lot of childlike play in his work.

“I am living the reverse life. From 20 to 35, I was really just playing an adult,” Andre said. “I was forcing myself to look calm and put together, not really letting my true colors shine. I was trying to be rational. That was a game—you try to play it, you force it. And now, I’m living my true childhood, letting the inner child be a little crazy. And accepting that I’m someone who’s not really happy when they have to be serious or stay within the conventions. I need fewer boundaries.”

And so he set out to break the boundaries of conventional watch design – and doing it by being deliberately provocative.

A Philosophy Of Design

The first watch that caught my attention was a vintage Omega Seamaster that popped up on my Instagram feed. As a history and literary nerd, I couldn’t help but smile at the irony—its seconds hand had been replaced by a tiny, unmistakable Jacques Cousteau hat. It was playful, almost cartoonish, but layered with meaning. A clever, subversive nod to the Seamaster name that somehow made the watch feel deeper, not sillier.

The watch world, or perhaps the world in general, can be tough on change. There’s a real schism built into it—on one hand, it takes itself seriously (and for good reason), but on the other, there’s an undercurrent of collectors constantly reminding us that this is supposed to be fun. Just look at the Gondolo Gang—the crew of Brazilian collectors who helped bring Patek Philippe to the Americas. We all know that iconic photo of them wearing their Patek sombreros. That’s fun. Go to any watch meetup, from RedBar to Watches & Wonders, and you’ll see it: people laughing, trading stories, passing around watches like Pokémon cards for grown-ups.

André’s disruptive designs run against the grain of seriousness associated with collecting, but for him, that means what he’s doing is working.

“I think I love mixed feelings,” he told me, “because it means you are trying. You are trying to move something. I needed to prove, though, that I could make ends meet. I needed to prove that irrationality could work.”

And if there’s one thing that gives watch people mixed feelings, it’s quartz. He leaned right into that tension with his collaboration with Furlan Marri—swapping the running seconds for a pixelated heart on their Nero Sabbia mechaquartz model, paired with the tagline: “Quartz watches have a beating heart too.” A tongue-in-cheek jab, sure, but also a genuine defense of the often-dismissed movement.

And slowly, it worked. He bet on attention. He embraced the criticism. Bit by bit, the blogs took notice. Instagram caught the vibe. Word started to spread. And before long, he was on my feed—and probably yours too.

The Banksy comparisons notwithstanding, André won’t even call himself an artist. But it’s clear he’s operating on a different creative wavelength, one that blends culture, soul, and satire, and projects it all onto the canvas of a watch.

“I’m not a revolutionary guy. I don’t want to kill the system and it’s more like I want to belong. I’m okay not to belong in the usual way, but let me twist it [a little] but not disrespect. The French, you know, we cut off Kings’ heads, so we’ve got some of this appetite for… to be a little bit of the bad guy.”

“The time has come when maybe we are done creating icons,” he continued. “Maybe that’s the time where you kill the icons, but not instead of breaking the icons you try to mix them with something. Maybe the icons in the watch world we have come to know and love are just a little bit boring. So sometimes you need to rejuvenate an icon by twisting it. By showing that. Yeah, yeah, that’s a serious product, but not always. We have time to be serious but one day of the week we can maybe be like the buffoon instead of the king.

You know the king and the buffoons work together. The King is supposed to be the representative of God. But then the king is also a human. So, the buffoon explains things to all the people in front of the king, that sometimes [in that process] he makes fun of him, to make him look more human so the audience, [normal people] can relate to the king. So I would say I’m a buffoon — It’s not a good word in France because it’s a little bit like a clown and I don’t want to be the clown just to be silly. I want it to be more. If it’s a clown just to be stupid and to to be hateful, that’s not the point. I hope to be an interesting buffoon. To help people relate to the king, to the icons.”

That’s where I feel most profiles of André and seconde/seconde/ fall short. They miss this part of his thinking. They miss his philosophy. Comparing him to Banksy doesn’t make sense. Banksy’s whole purpose is political provocation, to make the powers-that-be uncomfortable. André wants to humanize watches, and our relationship with them. He’s someone with a deep love for horology. He wants to dress it down, literally and figuratively, and strip away the seriousness, all while respecting an industry he’s spent years fighting to be accepted by.

It’s a delicate balance, finding acceptance in a world where you’re consciously pushing against the status quo. And somehow, André has done just that.

His Desk Diver – a collab with Christopher Ward is probably the best example of this balance. Dive watches encourage us to cosplay as divers, just ask the team at Comex. The seconde/seconde/ Desk Diver times intervals from the world actual desk divers inhabit; the bezel’s got a “dopamine toxicity” timer and a silhouette of a coffee cup (shoutout to my brothers and sisters with caffeine addictions). This is a desk diver that deconstructs the fantasy of a diver’s watch and in doing so, somehow makes it feel more genuinely relevant than a conventional diver’s watch ever could be.

When I asked him if he had any formal art or design background, he just shrugged. He didn’t. But André feels that you don’t have to be a “designer” to design. So I asked him: without any formal training, what’s your process? When you see a watch, how do you come up with an idea?

“I don’t really have one. I just have always been impacted by visual things. I still associate creativity with that inner child in me… a mind with less boundaries, the ability to think about many different things. If the usual process is child, then adult, then wise—I still aspire to be wise. But I can play with the stages of life. I can mix them [in my work].”

Connection To His Past

Then he told me a story about his great uncle and aunt—one a watercolor painter, the other a wood sculptor. On weekends, he would travel to their country home, and the contrast between their lives and his parents’ structured 9-to-5 routine opened his eyes to something different. A quieter rebellion. A gentler version of freedom.

“I remember the feeling when I went with my family to this great Uncle’s house. His work was next to the kitchen, it was his workshop where he was painting and his wife was sculpting. And for me, that was such another way to look at life. It was the antithesis to my parents. [It showed me] that there was more than one way to live life. It was the mirror of my family. Their life was objectively less structured and there are pros and cons in those two lifestyles, but [they] impacted me a lot.

One sculpting shapes with wood on one side and then he was painting on the other. [Their life was about creating something that] was really tangible. You could see the shapes she was sculpting—a lot of people, bodies and stuff—and [his paintings were] more transparent, really light, low contrast colors.

And [in hindsight it] is funny, I was not like, I would like to have this life. I was not like I was not dwelling on their life. But now that sometimes I’m experiencing this life, working at home [making art] like my aunt and uncle. I relate to them now. I realize that what we are making may not be useful, but can still have a reason. And if what I create makes someone smile or brings some emotion, I think about them.”

Understanding seconde/seconde/

He told me he’s not interested in being understood. And that makes sense. Some artists want to be decoded but André wants to be felt, he wants to evoke some level of emotion. He doesn’t hide behind irony. His work is sincere because it’s inherently a little absurd. The dial is a playground. The hands are a punchline.

And maybe that’s the best way to understand him, not as a provocateur or prankster, but as someone unafraid to mix things, to play, to risk being misunderstood if it means saying something that matters. Someone who helps us connect with the icons we admire in the watch world by playing the buffoon, without ever being one.

After all, as I once read deep in some internet rabbit hole: “You can be cautious or creative, but you can’t be a cautious creative.”