Schaefer & Companions Solune Antarctica Micro-Painting: André Martinez Paints the Polar Sea Under a Microscope

Description

Schaefer & Companions is a small Swiss artist-collaboration house founded by Christophe Schaefer, a manufacture whose entire premise is to treat the watch dial as a canvas and invite a different artist to paint, engrave, enamel or marquetry it for each limited release. On April 21, 2026, the brand's Antarctica-themed series gained a new instalment, in the form of a Solune-case watch with a dial hand-executed by Spanish micro-painter André Martinez.

Martinez's craft is almost cinematic: he paints under a microscope, applying ultra-fine strokes in white and blue over a black base dial, reading every brushstroke through a lens that measures in fractions of a millimetre. The result, on the wrist, is a dial that captures the fragile beauty of Antarctic ice and the shifting blues of polar water, rendered in a way that no print, decal or laser-engraved process could come close to. It reads less as a watch dial and more as a miniature painting you happen to wear.

The launch ships in two case variations — a regular brushed stainless steel and a grey ion-plated (IP) treatment — both built in Schaefer's distinctive 12-pointed "Sun" bezel Solune case. Production is very small, in keeping with the brand's model of treating every release as a collectible artwork rather than a series-produced watch.

Design

The Solune case is the one constant in Schaefer & Companions' output, and it is recognisable at a glance: a 12-pointed solar bezel that evokes a sun, sharp angular lugs that soften considerably on the wrist despite the on-paper dimensions, and a balance of polished, satin-finished and brushed surfaces across the case sides. The ion-plated grey variant flattens the light for a more subdued, stealthier presence; the natural stainless-steel version reads brighter and more formal.

The star of the design, though, is the dial. Martinez starts with a black-lacquered base, lays it under his microscope, and works white and blue pigments in painterly, organic strokes that mimic the textures of polar water. The pattern is genuinely hand-made; no two dials are identical, and the artist has signed each one. Because the strokes are applied at microscopic scale, the dial changes depending on how close you hold it: from arm's length it reads as a polar seascape; in closer view you see every individual pigment stroke, every micro-gesture of the artist's hand.

Hands are kept restrained so that nothing competes with the dial — a slim set of polished indices and pointers — and the Solune's bezel, case sides and integrated lug geometry do the rest of the visual work. It is a watch designed to be looked into rather than looked at.

Specifications

Model: Schaefer & Companions Solune — Antarctica Micro-Painting by André Martinez
Case: 43 mm × 49.3 mm × 11.4 mm, stainless steel; two finishes — natural steel or grey ion-plated (IP)
Bezel: Schaefer signature 12-pointed "Sun" bezel
Crystal: Sapphire with anti-reflective coating
Dial: Hand-executed micro-painting by André Martinez — ultra-fine white and blue strokes on a black lacquered base, applied under microscope
Hands & indices: Polished, Super-LumiNova-free to preserve the painting
Movement: Swiss automatic (Solune base) — Schaefer's standard caliber platform
Water resistance: Typical Solune rating (50 m); confirmable at order
Strap: Leather/textile with pin buckle
Production: Very limited — each piece signed and numbered by the artist and the manufacture
Price: On application. Typical Solune Grand Art series pricing falls between CHF 18,000 and CHF 25,000 depending on artist and technique.

What's Exciting

This is one of the few pieces from the entire Watches & Wonders 2026 cycle where the watch's real content is not the case, not the calibre, but human craft at a scale you almost cannot see. Micro-painting is a niche art form — one that almost no watch brand commissions at this level of fidelity, because the production economics do not allow it. Schaefer's entire business model exists to make that kind of work possible: build a neutral, high-quality case, and hand the dial over to the best artists in a given technique.

For a collector whose wrist already holds the best of Swiss serial manufacture — a Rolex, a JLC, a Grand Seiko — the Solune Antarctica Micro-Painting is exactly the kind of outlier piece that earns its place through different content, not more of the same content. It is the antithesis of mass market: hand-painted, signed, unique in its strokes, and impossible to manufacture in volume. In a show cycle dominated by anniversaries and re-editions, Schaefer offers something that behaves more like a commissioned painting that happens to tell time.

The only honest caveat: the price is discretionary and on application, so the watch is naturally positioned toward collectors already primed to treat horology as an art purchase rather than a lifestyle purchase. For that audience, very little on the market in April 2026 rivals the purity of what André Martinez has done here.

History

Schaefer & Companions was founded by Christophe Schaefer as a deliberately artisanal answer to an industrialised market: celebrate human creativity by collaborating with artists from around the world on handcrafted dials executed through enamelling, marquetry, engraving and micro-painting, then produce each collaboration in tiny quantities. The brand debuted with its Antarctica collection, a conceptual thread tied to the fragility, silence and vastness of the polar regions — themes that lend themselves naturally to enamel, stone-setting, engraving and now, with Martinez, micro-painting.

Before the 2026 Antarctica Micro-Painting, the brand produced Antarctica dials using enamel and marquetry treatments; the entry of a micro-painter into the series extends the Antarctica theme into a new medium while keeping the conceptual thread intact. The brand's collaborations are structured so that each artist's signature is preserved in how the dial is executed, rather than flattened into a brand aesthetic — which is in itself a quietly radical position inside an industry that typically prioritises brand recognisability over artist identity.