Paris 1st arrondissement, by night series — 6 Paintings by Arnaud Quercy

The opening series of 72 Facets of Paris — and the work's prelude. Where the ten other arrondissement-series move in strict three-time, these seven facets are played ad lib, free of the bar, soft and mysterious: they belong to the eight-measure introduction of the piano waltz from which the whole cycle springs. They cover the deep historic heart of the 1st arrondissement between midnight and two in the morning — the oldest, most monumental Paris, deserted and dreaming, suspended in the hour before the city wakes.

Their harmonies are the rarest and gravest of the cycle. Four facets rest on a minor-major seventh with flattened fifth (D−Maj7♭5, A−Maj7♭5, G−Maj7♭5), an archaic, unresolved sonority that seems to belong to no key; two more lean on the half-diminished chord (C−7♭5, A♭−7♭5), the sound of suspended tension. Translated through the artist's ideamorphic method, these grave harmonies fall to near-black, midnight-blue and bare stone — the canvases weighted and still, broken here and there by a single warm accident: an ochre angle, a charge of magenta, a votive red, as if one lamp still burned in the dark.

The seven places trace a slow nocturnal circuit. The Colonnade of the Louvre opens at midnight; twenty minutes on, the royal parish church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois answers across the square; then the arcades of the Palais-Royal, the baroque mass of Saint-Roch, the Galerie de Valois, the circular Place des Victoires with its equestrian Louis XIV, and at two o'clock the Hôtel de Toulouse — seat of the Banque de France — closing the prelude. Monuments, churches and royal squares: the 1st offers no shops and no waking crowds, only the city's institutional and sacred fabric held in the dark.

Seen together, the seven compose the cycle's most sombre and concentrated field — a wall of black and blue-grey from which form barely emerges, lit only by those isolated warm sparks. It is the visual equivalent of a held breath: the harmonic ground from which, measure by measure and arrondissement by arrondissement, the day and the waltz will rise. Like the full cycle of seventy-two, these seven facets were commissioned together and now belong to a single Paris collection.