MAVERICK GENIUS

Once a wizard on the pitch, Eric Cantona now creates magic on a smaller field

YOU DON’T INTERVIEW Eric Cantona. You go on a journey with him. I did just that when the Frenchman was in Singapore to launch the new Hautlence Vagabonde watches (above) in a special event with Cortina Watches. A few hours prior, he had taken me through his formative years, when he lived in a cave carved into the Marseille hillside. It was a home filled with art and love.

“My father still paints. He has always been very passionate about art. He would take my brother and me to galleries when we were little,” said Cantona.

This passion informed the way Cantona lived his life. As a football player, he was a genius and accomplished feats that left fans in awe. Off the pitch, he was famously temperamental and once made global headlines for launching a flying kick towards a heckler who was hurling abuse at him. For that shenanigan, he was fined and suspended for eight months. But that’s all water under the bridge now, and the Cantona in front of me appears measured, contemplative and calm.

After hanging up his soccer boots, he’s devoted most of his time to creative pursuits. Cantona has dipped his toes into the cinematic world, appearing in more than 20 films and starting a film production company with his brothers. He has also collaborated with Hautlence on two watches.

“My relationship with Hautlence started six years ago towards the end of 2013, and the first watch we did together was the Invictus Morphos,” Cantona reminisced.

“When I was first approached to help design the watch, I started thinking about the meaning of time, specifically the changes that occur during the passage of time.” From Cantona’s fertile mind, the blue butterfly emerged from its cocoon. “The Morphos’s butterfly, Morpho, represents metamorphosis and we chose blue because it’s the colour of the sky,” said Cantona. The collaboration was such a success that the two parties went straight to work on another watch. The result was the psychedelic Hautlence Vortex Primary, a timepiece that reminds one of the works of Piet Mondrian.

“I like Hautlence because it always tries to find something special in the way it tells time. It’s crazy but also ingenious. I mean, not all geniuses are crazy but most of them are,” said Cantona with a wry chuckle.

He described the immense pleasure of meeting the people behind the brand, the ones who made the watches tick. “I think it’s important that I understand every step of the watchmaking process. I met many people and learnt a lot of things, and I realised that I knew nothing. The more you know, the more you realise you don’t know.”

Cantona admitted that creating fine art on the micro scale of a timepiece has been a tremendous challenge. What makes it even more demanding is the fact that Hautlence is a luxury brand with “ultra-demanding fans and collectors”.

But Cantona has never been one to shy away from difficult tasks, whether on the football pitch or in the field of horology. He is already hard at work on his third timepiece collaboration with Hautlence, which he revealed will be out in the middle of 2019. I probed him about what we could expect, but in typical enigmatic Cantona fashion, he merely flashed a tight-lipped smile. AM

“I LIKE HAUTLENCE BECAUSE IT ALWAYS TRIES TO FIND SOMETHING SPECIAL IN THE WAY IT TELLS TIME. IT MIGHT BE A BIT CRAZY BUT IT’S ALSO INGENIOUS”