The Gardens series — 8 Paintings by Arnaud Quercy

The Gardens is a series of eight small-format works on paper — acrylic and watercolor — all produced in 2024. The site is consistent: the Jardin du Luxembourg, and a bench at the edge of it. The format is not.

At 10 × 15 cm for the acrylics and 12 × 16 cm for the watercolors, these works resist the monumental. They hold the scale of direct observation, of something noted on the spot rather than composed after the fact. What changes across the series is not the place but the light — or more precisely, the chromatic logic that light imposes on form.

The acrylic works anchor the series. Promenade aux jardins du Luxembourg, l'été (AQC0508) and Pause déjeuner sur un banc (AQC0510) are structured around warm, high-saturation fields — deep reds, burnt sienna, darkred, russet — organized into angular blocks that press against each other with deliberate weight. These are not descriptive paintings. The bench and the garden path do not appear as such; they are translated into color relationships and geometric boundaries that carry the heat and density of a Paris summer at midday.

The watercolor variations — Promenade aux jardins du Luxembourg, Variations 3 through 6 (AQC0617–AQC0620) — shift the register entirely. Yellow-ocher and burlywood open out to blue-gray structures; the palette lightens and breathes. Where the acrylics compress, the watercolors diffuse. The medium itself participates in the meaning: the fluid edges of the watercolor ground enact the quality of filtered afternoon light through garden canopies, in a way the acrylic's clean boundaries cannot.

Across both media, dark linear elements — olive and black — perform the work of architecture: they mark limits, define passages, create the sense of a space that is contained but not enclosed. This is a garden as urban interior, bounded by iron fences and stone balustrades, held within the city but separate from it.

All eight works are sold. Collectors in Paris, Issy-les-Moulineaux, Los Angeles, Henderson, and Italy. The series was shown at the Rencontres au Marché de la Création, the Salon d'art contemporain Metamorphose, and entered the Permanent Collection 2025 — Resonance in Form. The dispersal is itself a kind of diffraction: these small paintings now inhabit different lives, different walls, carrying the same afternoon in different rooms.