News · Ressence

Ressence turns its rotating dial into a maze you can only solve at noon

The Type 9 JW puts two of Jules Wittock's hand-drawn labyrinths on a moving dial, and they line up twice a day. EUR 26,200.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 19 September 2026

• Ressence has worked with Brussels-based artist Jules Wittock on a limited-edition Type 9 carrying two of his freehand labyrinths, engraved and filled by hand.
• Because the inner disc rotates, the two mazes align only at midday and midnight, and the joined path spells a word the brand will not reveal.
• Two references are offered, the emerald green JWE and the black JWB, both listed at EUR 26,200 and both already sold out.

Art watches have a credibility problem, and it is mostly self-inflicted. A brand finds an artist, the artist's best-known motif gets shrunk onto a dial, and the result is a print rather than a watch, because nothing about the object changed except its surface. Ressence has been dodging that trap for a while now, most recently with Terumasa Ikeda on the eight-piece Type 9 IKE, and it has gone at the problem again with an artist whose whole subject is finding a way through. The result is the Type 9 JW, made with Jules Wittock.

A maze that only solves itself twice a day

Wittock's rule for his own work, which he has followed since childhood, is that each labyrinth has a single entrance, a single exit, and a path between them that spells a word. There are two of those mazes here, one on the rotating inner disc and one on the dial around it, and because that disc turns, the two drawings are misaligned for almost the entire day. Only at midday and midnight do they line up, at which point the path runs and the word can be read.

Nobody outside the artist and the owners is being told what the word is. As a reason to look at your watch at noon, this beats checking whether you have missed an email.

Engraved into titanium, then filled by hand

The mazes are not printed and they are not transferred. Each path is engraved into the titanium dial and then filled in white by hand, which is why the pattern has an edge you can see catching light in Ressence's own close-ups rather than lying flat like ink. Hand-filling that quantity of line on a disc this size is not a process that scales, which is part of why work like this arrives in small numbers, and Ressence's own argument is that the drawing lives in depth rather than on the surface.

Two versions exist. The JWE carries its white maze on an emerald green dial in ALD-coated titanium, a coating that shifts towards purple as the watch tilts, so the colour you see at arm's length is not the colour you see looking straight down. The JWB is the quieter of the pair, a white maze on a black titanium dial inside a black coated case, and it is the one that reads as a graphic object rather than a colour experiment.

Thirty-nine millimetres, thirty-nine grams

Ressence has built the Type 9 to 39mm across and 39 grams, a symmetry the brand has clearly enjoyed pointing out, and the weight is the number that matters. Thirty-nine grams is little enough that the watch stops registering as an object you are carrying within about a minute of strapping it on. For a piece you are meant to keep looking at, being physically forgettable is a strange advantage, and it works.

The minute indications sit outside the dial on a fixed bezel with engraved indexes, which keeps the dial itself free for the artwork, and Super-LumiNova fills the engraved indications so the thing is still readable in the dark. Titanium-circled details and the Type 9's fluid lugs run into a 20/18mm strap.

No crown, which is still the strangest thing about it

Turn the watch over and there is no crown to find. Setting the time and winding it is done by turning the case back, which is the Ressence signature and remains, after all these years, the detail that most confuses people picking one up for the first time. It is not a gimmick. Removing the crown is what lets the case sides stay unbroken and the dial sit as close to the crystal as it does, and the dial proximity is the entire reason the artwork reads the way it does.

I will admit I came to this one sceptical. An artist collaboration priced well into five figures is the easiest thing in watchmaking to be cynical about, and my working assumption on opening the page was that I would find a nice drawing on an existing watch. What changed my mind was the alignment. Letting the artwork resolve only at midday and midnight is a decision that only makes sense if you have thought about what a rotating dial actually does, and it is not a decision a graphic overlay would ever have arrived at.

Ressence Type 9 JW pricing and availability

Both references are listed by Ressence at EUR 26,200, and both the JWE and the JWB are showing as sold out on the brand's own store, with enquiries handled through Ressence and selected retailers. Australian pricing has not been listed.

A sold-out limited edition is the most predictable outcome in modern watchmaking and it tells you very little, so I would rather end on what the piece proves than on how quickly it went. Ressence has spent years building a dial that moves in ways other dials do not, and it has been handing that mechanism to artists for long enough now that the question is no longer whether the idea works but what each one does with it. Wittock has used it as a lock. The drawing is only true twice a day and wrong the rest of the time, which is a strange and rather brave thing to build into an object whose entire job is telling you where you are. Whether you could ever actually solve the thing is another matter. You would want to be looking at the right moment.