Fourths & Suspended series — 6 Paintings by Arnaud Quercy

The suspended fourth is harmony in a state of waiting. The interval — a perfect fourth raised over a root, with the third withheld — sits at the center of Western music’s most searching moments: the opening of Satie’s Gymnopédies, the quartal architecture Miles Davis explored in “Milestones,” the unresolved questions that run through the folk and jazz traditions alike. It is neither major nor minor. It commits to nothing. In chromesthetic translation, this ambiguity becomes color: suspended chords produce palettes without a warm-cool verdict, their hues determined entirely by the root and fourth rather than by the defining interval of a triad.

The chromesthetic translation of suspended chords shifts dramatically with the root. D sus4 yields orange and yellow-orange — an entirely warm palette, root and fifth in amber and earth, the absence of a third leaving the harmony permanently open. B sus4 moves to the opposite extreme: yellow-green and green, a near-monochrome fog of gray and silver. Ab sus4 floods the canvas with blue, the root’s hue recurring through every register. The dominant seventh variants extend this range further: A7Sus wraps its suspension in warm yellow-orange and red-orange; Bb7Sus builds from violet in the bass to pale light at the top. Across the series, register follows the universal rule — low notes compress toward black, high notes dissolve toward silver — but the hue itself is determined entirely by the root.

Arnaud Quercy explores this suspended quality across six études, painted in watercolor and acrylic on paper, in formats ranging from 15×21 to 24×32 cm. All six are set in waltz time, in three — a consistent triple pulse that gives every phrase a rocking, forward quality, the suspension carried upward or downward on three beats. Half the études are played Animé, with clear forward motion; the other half Lent, meditative and slow. Dynamics stay intimate: mostly mp, with a single mf in B Sus4, the loudest work in the collection. Note counts range from five to ten, the sparsest étude distilling the chord to root and fourth only, the densest spanning nearly five octaves in a single ascending phrase.

Three works mark the series’ poles. AQC0796, the Ab Sus4 étude, is the largest and densest — ten notes from Ab2 to Eb7, the canvas “flooded with blue at every register,” the suspension held open from floor to ceiling, warm red-violet accents at D5 the only intrusion of warmth into the cool architecture. At the opposite extreme, the D Sus4 étude (AQC0960) distils the suspended chord to its minimum: five notes, root and fifth only, no third at all, an amber monochrome that darkens downward and lightens upward without a single cool tone anywhere on the canvas. B Sus4 (AQC0962) takes the series’ purity the furthest — six notes of root and fourth climbing five octaves, no outside tones, the painting a near-monochrome in gray-green that the artist describes as “a fog of gray-green,” the suspension held open in grayscale.

On the canvas, Fourths & Suspended divides into distinct chromatic territories rather than a single palette. The warm études — D Sus4, A7Sus — live in amber, orange, and yellow-orange, their suspensions carrying heat rather than the coolness one might expect from an unresolved chord. The cool études — B Sus4, Bb7Sus — occupy the violet and green end of the spectrum. The Ab Sus4 étude stands between these poles, its dominant blue ranging from near-black in the bass to near-white at the top. What unifies the series visually is not color but structure: every canvas is a gradient, darkening at the base and brightening at the crest, each note finding its chromesthetic position in the vertical field. The same suspension, six different roots, six different hues — but one shared architecture.

What this series reveals is that suspension is not a single sound but a condition. The withheld third is always absent, but the chord it leaves behind can be warm or cool, dense or spare, climbing or falling. Quercy’s six études do not exhaust the suspended chord — they open it. One work was presented at the exhibition “Through the Aperture — Research on Harmony” at Art Quam Anima in Paris, and one étude has since entered a collection in Switzerland. The series remains largely available, its questions still hanging in the air — which is, perhaps, exactly where a suspended chord belongs.