Ab Major series — 16 Paintings by Arnaud Quercy

Ab Major carries four flats and a reputation for lyrical repose. Schubert turned to it for the slow movement of his last piano sonata, D. 960 — a key that settles the listener into a stillness that is not empty but full of attention. The triad — Ab, C, Eb — spans a major third and a perfect fifth, the same architecture as every major chord, but in this enharmonic neighborhood the intervals breathe differently. Ab Major is the key of quiet weight, of gravity that does not press.

Through chromesthesia, the chord produces a striking palette: blue at the root, red at the third, blue-violet at the fifth. Two cool tones frame a single warm center — C's red seated between the blue of Ab and the violet of Eb, a heart beating inside a cool surround. Register shifts the colors predictably: Ab below the third octave darkens toward black, C above the sixth octave fades to near-white, and in the mid-range the three hues hold their full saturation. A recurring non-chord tone, D, appears as an orange accent across many of the studies — a warm visitor from outside the key, threading through the cool architecture.

Arnaud Quercy explores this tension between warmth and cold across sixteen études, painted between 2023 and 2025 in acrylic and watercolor — on paper, on wood panel, on linen canvas. The formats range from small studies at 10×15 cm to a large-scale work at 114×146 cm. The series divides roughly between slow and fast: nine études marked Lent, five Animé, one Modéré, with dynamics hovering at mp and p — the loudest reaching only mf. All but one are played legato, the notes flowing into one another. Bell contours and ascending lines dominate, with several inverted bells and descending waltzes in triple time. The note count ranges from three to nine. The orange D appears in ten of the sixteen works, making the non-chord tone nearly as characteristic of the series as the triad itself.

Three works mark the poles. Variation 6 — the largest canvas, 114×146 cm on linen — packs nine notes into a quiet, animated ascent from sub-bass to treble, every register claimed, the palette running its full range from near-black to near-white. At the opposite extreme, Reflexions 3 reduces the chord to three notes — a lone Ab2 in the bass, with D4 and D5 above, both outside the chord entirely. The artist describes it as "a triad defined not by what it contains but by what it withholds." And Variation 10 introduces a semitone clash between Eb4 and E4 that no other study carries — three visitors crowding the chord tones, the harmony at its least settled, the palette restless with "warm intrusions crowding the cool chord tones."

Across the series, the canvases share a family resemblance: blue-black weight in the bass, the red of C burning somewhere in the middle registers, and blue-violet threading between them wherever the fifth appears. When D enters, its orange glow warms the upper canvas — sometimes a brief flicker, sometimes claiming the widest field of any color present. Several études omit the fifth entirely, reducing the palette to a dialogue between blue and red. Others omit the third, and the canvas turns to ice — all blue, all violet, the orange visitor the sole warm presence. The visual rhythm across the collection is one of controlled oscillation: cool dominance, warm interruption, cool return.

Ab Major reveals itself slowly in this series. The chord's essential character — that single red note warming a blue field — becomes more legible with each variation, each reduction, each rearrangement of the same three tones. Three-quarters of these works have found homes in collections from Paris to Boston, from Mexico City to Faenza — the key of lyrical repose travelling quietly outward, its cool warmth carried far from the studio where it was first heard as color.