Bossa Nova, Solabi Vare — Sand on Wood Pit by Arnaud Quercy

About This Artwork

Bossa Nova — Solabi Vare, I Streaming live from Art Quam Anima, 28 rue du Dragon, Paris — day and night. What you are watching is leaving.

A rhythm has been laid in sand. The bossa nova clave — dotted quarter, dotted quarter, quarter — becomes five forms across a single surface: three raised, two hollowed. One measure, complete. The arrangement is free; the proportions are not. Relief and hollow are the same gesture — only the direction of the pressure changes. And what is hollowed counts as much as what is raised: in music, the silence belongs to the phrase.

This is the first piece of Solabi Vare, a series that translates rhythm into space. Each work is one measure, whole in itself — and none of them lasts. A gallery is built to keep. This work was made to be let go. Behind the window the sun comes through and dries the sand; gravity does the rest. To show it is already to begin losing it. Nothing here will be quite the same tomorrow — and that is the point. Arnaud Quercy's paintings give you a chord all at once.

Time, like music, has to pass in order to exist. So this is an attempt to make a rhythm not seen, not heard, but lived — over minutes, hours, perhaps days. In the gallery, beside the work, there is a water spray. Anyone who wants the music to last a little longer is invited to mist the sand. It saves nothing — the sun always wins — but it buys an hour, a day. How long the work lives is decided by those who tend it, and by the artist, who chooses when it ends. This stream, and the timelapse it leaves behind, are what remain.

Bossa Nova (AQC0974). Sand bas-relief in a black wood pit, mounted on a pedestal. 50 × 70 × 12 cm, approx. 40 kg. Made by Arnaud Quercy at the rue du Dragon studio, Paris, May 2026. Signed lower right. Live art: the work decays as time erodes its surface; a camera films it continuously from the vernissage onward. Not for sale.