C Major series — 20 Paintings by Arnaud Quercy

C Major is where Western harmony begins. No sharps, no flats — the white-key triad, the chord every pianist learns first. It is the key of Mozart's Sonata Facile, of the opening bars of the Well-Tempered Clavier, of a thousand folk songs and hymns. In chromesthetic translation, C Major burns warm: the red of C, the yellow of E, the red-orange of G. Three primary-adjacent colors, nothing cool, nothing ambiguous. A chord that hides nothing.

The chromesthetic palette runs from near-black in the low bass to near-white in the upper treble. C below the third octave darkens toward black — a deep, felt red that reads as darkness on the canvas. E above the sixth octave bleaches to silver, almost white. Between these extremes, the mid-register holds the chord's true warmth: saturated red at C4, bright yellow at E4, clear red-orange at G4. The fifth, G, provides the warmest middle ground — orange that mediates between root and third. There is no cool color anywhere in the triad. Every tone is warm.

Arnaud Quercy explores this elemental palette across twenty études, painted between 2024 and 2025 in acrylic and watercolor — on paper, on wood panel, one on linen canvas. The formats range from intimate studies at 10×15 cm to a single large-scale work at 73×92 cm. Most are played Lent, at a quiet mp or p, legato — slow, meditative, unhurried. The contours divide evenly between bell arches in four and descending waltzes in three. One variation breaks the pattern with a Modéré tempo, and one introduces a Bb accent — the only non-chord tone in the entire series. The note count ranges from three to eight, the sparsest études distilling the triad to its irreducible minimum.

Three works illustrate the series' range. Variation 1 — the largest canvas, 73×92 cm on linen — draws on the quality Quercy describes as "graceful circling, warmth held without urgency," after Sergio Mihanovich's waltz "Sometime Ago." Four notes only, the melody taking one long stride from near-black bass to warm orange. Variation 7 reaches below the piano: C0 at 16 Hz, a frequency felt in the body rather than heard, its chromesthetic translation so dark it reads as absence — the melody climbs from there through seven notes, building warmth out of silence. At the other extreme, Variation 9 distils C Major to three notes — E6, G5, C1 — what the artist calls "the irreducible minimum of a triad, a waltz in three words: light, middle, ground."

On the canvas, C Major reads as a warm gradient. The low register anchors each painting in darkness — the near-black of C1 or C2 at the base. The upper register dissolves into pale yellows and whites where E6 and E7 catch the light. Between floor and ceiling, the reds and oranges of the chord's middle octaves fill the canvas with the warmth that defines this key. The visual rhythm comes from repetition with variation: the same three colors, rebalanced in each étude by the number of notes, their register, and the space between them. Some canvases are nearly empty — three notes, vast silence. Others are dense, seven or eight tones filling the field from bass to treble.

C Major is the simplest chord in this practice, and that simplicity is the point. There is nowhere to hide in three notes of unalloyed warmth. Each étude tests the same question: how many ways can red, yellow, and orange occupy a surface? After twenty variations, the chord never exhausts itself. Several of these études were first shown at the Salon Metamorphose at the Halle des Blancs Manteaux in Paris, and more than half the series has since found its way into collections from New York to Zurich to São Paulo — the home key travelling far from home, carrying its warmth with it.