{"id":2098624,"date":"2026-09-29T16:09:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T14:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/?p=2098624"},"modified":"2026-10-02T03:31:54","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:31:54","slug":"iwc-homo-faber-laurin-schaub-ceralume-en","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/2026\/09\/29\/iwc-homo-faber-laurin-schaub-ceralume-en\/","title":{"rendered":"In Venice, IWC turns its ceramic technology into a work of art"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Some collaborations are marketing exercises, and others are closer to a technical dialogue. The one IWC Schaffhausen has formed with Swiss ceramicist Laurin Schaub for the 2026 Homo Faber Biennale in Venice clearly belongs to the second category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Swiss manufacture returns to the setting of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini for this fourth edition of the biennale, organised by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship and placed under the theme \u201cAn Island of Light\u201d, devised by artistic director Es Devlin. IWC presents three porcelain moons there \u2014 moon jars, spherical vases that originated under Korea’s Joseon dynasty in the 18th century and are recognisable by their perfectly round shape and milky-white glaze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this collaboration, Laurin Schaub, one of the most recognised Swiss ceramicists of his generation, developed a new luminous glaze incorporating Super-LumiNova pigments, drawing directly on Ceralume technology, owned by IWC, a luminescent ceramic developed in-house by the manufacture. Two of the three moons will be shown in the Piscina Gandini, a former indoor swimming pool dating from 1961, where, reflected in the still water, they will create the illusion of a full moon. The third piece will join IWC’s recently opened boutique in Venice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To shape his moons, Laurin Schaub used nerikomi, a Japanese technique in which clays of different colours are meticulously layered and worked by hand into a single sheet, which is then pressed into a spherical mould and fired in a kiln. On the outside of the vases, the artist took inspiration from the crater-pitted surface of the moon, before applying his luminescent glaze \u2014 a composition that had to be adjusted through countless trials, varying the proportions of pigments and the firing temperatures. In the dark, the glaze reveals a hidden inscription on each vase: \u201cLux Perpetua\u201d, a direct reference to the legacy of IWC’s perpetual calendars as much as to its Ceralume technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The choice of the moon is anything but arbitrary for the Schaffhausen house. Moon-phase displays have featured in IWC’s catalogue for more than forty years, notably as a key indication of its perpetual calendars, whose precision has been continually refined over the generations \u2014 up to a record held by the Portugieser Eternal Calendar, whose moon-phase display deviates by only one day every 45 million years. Ceralume technology, for its part, is one of the manufacture’s most recent materials developments, born of a ball-milling process that produces a homogeneous mixture of ceramic powders and Super-LumiNova pigments, which absorb light and then release it in the dark. The same ceramic makes up the case of the Big Pilot’s Watch Perpetual Calendar Ceralume, limited to 250 pieces and presented at Watches and Wonders Geneva last April \u2014 now on show in IWC’s Venice boutique, alongside one of Laurin Schaub’s moons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By choosing to translate a complex material innovation into a contemplative craft object, IWC illustrates an underlying trend in contemporary watchmaking: setting laboratory and workshop, engineering and manual skill in dialogue, to tell the same story of precision in two distinct forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some collaborations are marketing exercises, and others are closer to a technical dialogue. The one IWC Schaffhausen has formed with Swiss ceramicist Laurin Schaub for the 2026 Homo Faber Biennale in Venice clearly belongs to the second category.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":214,"featured_media":2082638,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31161,30122],"tags":[60117],"class_list":["post-2098624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-high-tech-en","category-watches-and-jewelry","tag-iwc-schaffhausen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2098624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/214"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2098624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2098624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2082638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2098624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2098624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2098624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}