A Major series — 11 Paintings by Arnaud Quercy

Three sharps \u2014 the key of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto and the dancing Vivace of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. A Major is a bright key, but not a simple one: its three sharps give it a specificity that C or G Major lack. The triad \u2014 A, C\u266f, E \u2014 spans from warm to cool, the yellow-orange root and yellow fifth bracketing a blue-green third. Two warm tones framing one cool center, like a golden setting around a turquoise stone.

Through chromesthesia, the A Major triad translates into a palette governed by that warm-cool tension. The root A produces yellow-orange across the mid-register, deepening to amber and near-black in the bass octaves, brightening toward pale gold in the treble. The third, C\u266f, reads blue-green \u2014 cool, fresh, the color that gives the chord its distinctive character. In the extreme high register, C\u266f7 thins to silver, almost white. The fifth, E, shares the blue-green family, reinforcing the cool center rather than mediating between root and third as a warmer fifth might. The overall temperature leans warm, but that blue-green core ensures A Major never overheats.

Arnaud Quercy explores this interplay across eleven \u00e9tudes, painted between 2024 and 2025 in acrylic and watercolor \u2014 on paper and on wood panel. The formats are intimate, ranging from 10 by 15 centimetres to 21 by 30. Every work is played at mp, legato, and the tempos divide between Lent and Anim\u00e9 \u2014 slow meditation or animated momentum, nothing in between. The meters split between common time and triple time, the waltzes generally ascending while the four-beat \u00e9tudes favour arches and valleys. Note counts range from four to nine. Chromatic accents appear in four of the eleven works \u2014 violet, red, red-orange, blue-violet \u2014 brief tensions that touch the phrase and release. The remaining seven are pure triad, unadorned.

The opening \u00e9tude states the premise with remarkable economy: four notes spanning A1 to A4, pure chord tones, no accents \u2014 what Quercy describes as the chord's core "as simply as possible." At the opposite pole, Variation 8 packs nine pitches into an ascending waltz from A2 to C\u266f7, every octave inhabited, arriving at what the artist calls "the silver peak." Between these extremes, Variation 5 stands alone as the series' only descending \u00e9tude \u2014 a slow waltz that opens on C\u266f7 and falls through the full register to A1 in the deep bass, the single moment where the phrase comes to rest at the bottom rather than hanging suspended at the top.

Across the canvases, the A Major palette moves between two poles. Darkness lives in the bass register \u2014 the near-black of A1, the dark gray of A2 \u2014 anchoring the lower edge of each painting. Brightness accumulates in the upper octaves, where C\u266f and A in high registers thin toward silver and pale gold. The blue-green of the third provides the series' visual signature: a cool current running through the warm yellow-orange field, sometimes in the dense middle of the phrase, sometimes at the luminous peak. The chromatic accents \u2014 a touch of violet here, a flash of red there \u2014 introduce brief warmth or coolness that the surrounding chord tones quickly absorb.

A Major reveals itself as a key of contained reach. Eleven \u00e9tudes, all intimate in scale, all at a moderate dynamic, yet spanning from the near-silence of four notes to the density of nine. The series builds outward from its compressed opening, each variation testing a new contour or register while returning to the same chromesthetic core of yellow-orange and blue-green. More than half these works have found collectors from Paris to Montreal to Istanbul \u2014 the warm triad with its cool centre travelling quietly across three continents.