Collections

Synesthetic Explorations

The largest ongoing series in Quercy's practice, Synesthetic Explorations translates musical structures into visual form through chromesthetic mapping. Each painting assigns specific colors to musical notes based on the circle of fifths, then organizes those colors into geometric compositions that make audible relationships visible. The system is rigorous: C maps to red, G to red-orange, D to orange, and so on through the chromatic scale, with each chord generating its own palette of two or three dominant hues.

Within this series, the Research on Harmony cycle applies the method to individual chords — major, minor, and extended — across formats ranging from compact ten by fifteen centimeter watercolors to monumental acrylic canvases exceeding one hundred centimeters. The Réflexions sub-series extends the approach to octave relationships and interval studies, while specific variations draw from composers and performers including Bach, Chopin, and Miles Davis. A watercolor translating F# minor references Chopin's Polonaise in F# minor, Op. 44. An acrylic rendering of Bb Major draws from rhythm changes, the foundational jazz chord progression. A C minor study takes its point of departure from Miles Davis's "Solar."

The result is not illustration. These paintings function as independent visual compositions where color relationships carry the same structural logic as harmonic intervals. Whether working in watercolor's transparency or acrylic's opacity, Quercy treats the translation as a generative constraint that produces compositions he would not arrive at through purely visual thinking.

Nature in the City

This collection of steel sculptures examines wildlife adapting to urban environments. La Mouette de Montparnasse captures a seagull — a coastal bird that has colonized the rooftops and market stalls of Paris's 14th arrondissement — through angular steel planes that hover between pure abstraction and recognition. Viewers sometimes perceive a rhinoceros or a shark before the bird's form resolves, a productive ambiguity that mirrors the surprise of encountering marine life in a landlocked city.

Quercy fabricates every sculpture himself, cold-forming two-millimeter steel sheets with hammer against curved wooden blocks, then welding, grinding, and polishing the assembled planes. This direct metal fabrication follows the tradition established by Julio González and Pablo Gargallo, where the artist works the material rather than delegating to foundries or assistants. The knowledge lives in the hands — in understanding how steel responds to hammer blows, where it yields and where it resists. The resulting surfaces shift between polished silver-blue brightness and darker oxidized tones, reading as both industrial material and organic form.

MURMURATION continues this investigation, capturing the collective movement of starlings through an ascending steel composition mounted on a wood block. The vertical format and angular construction translate the flock's synchronized flight into static geometry that retains the sense of coordinated motion.

Transcendence

The Transcendence collection addresses philosophical and spiritual themes through abstract painting. Each work engages with a specific thinker or tradition: Wills Odyssey translates Nietzsche's concepts of self-determination and the will to power into deep tonal contrasts where dark red-gray foundations give way to blue contemplation and orange possibility. Transcendent Nexus explores St. Augustine's relationship between faith and reason, dividing the canvas into warm geometric zones of rational thought and cooler atmospheric spaces where a radiant circle suggests transcendence. Eternal Encompassing draws from Emily Dickinson's poem "Hope" — the thing with feathers that perches in the soul — presenting a pregnant woman as the embodiment of hope's nurturing potential against a fervent red ground.

These paintings share a visual language of geometric forms against saturated color fields, with black lines often serving as structural connectors between conceptual zones. The philosophical content is embedded in formal decisions — color temperature, spatial division, the relationship between containment and openness — rather than narrated through figurative representation.

Spells and Magic

A ceramic collection exploring mythological and symbolic themes through contemporary sculptural form. Archimedes, the owl, takes its name from both the ancient Greek mathematician and the wise owl from Disney's "The Sword in the Stone," presenting the bird through cubist abstraction where smooth curvilinear planes fold into one another to suggest form without literal description. High-temperature firing produces crystalline formations within the glaze, giving each piece an aged metallic patina in yellow-green and warm brown tones. GRIMOIRE sculpts an open book releasing geometric forms skyward — a prism, a hexagon, an oval disc — freezing the moment when a spell leaves the page.

Untamed Creations

This collection gathers works that explore movement, music, and creative freedom across multiple mediums. BIRD (Charlie Parker) translates the bebop saxophonist's improvisational genius into a ceramic sculpture of interlocking geometric planes on a black metal base — angular shapes extending outward while a central spherical element wrapped in curved bands suggests both musical notation and flight. Reader captures the moment of total absorption in a book through a matte, unglazed ceramic crescent that reads simultaneously as a figure bent over a page and as pages spread open.

The collection also includes portrait commissions like "Gus," the Shih Tzu, a cubist-inspired ceramic created from life at the Paris Profils et Reliefs workshop, where angular facets abstract the dog's features while incised wavy lines reference the breed's flowing coat.

Mediterranean Echoes

In August 2022, Quercy transformed a stretch of Salou Beach in Spain into an open-air gallery, sculpting five monumental sand bas-reliefs over five days. Two works honored jazz legends Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk through abstract and figurative sand carving at one hundred fifty by one hundred twenty centimeters. Three more explored themes of travel and contemplation: The Traveler, a solitary figure gazing seaward; The Woman Reading, absorbed in her book; and The Sailer, whose form reverses to reveal a fleet of boats.

None of the sculptures survived the tides. Each lived briefly — until seawater, wind, or footsteps erased it. The impermanence was the point. Beauty most present when it cannot last, documentation becoming the lasting artifact rather than the object itself. As Quercy put it: "Sometimes, the tide is the best curator. It teaches us to create, not to possess."

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Each artwork is unique, signed, and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued through Arnaud Quercy Creations. Prices are displayed in the gallery. For inquiries, exhibition loans, or commissions, contact Art Quam Anima at 28 rue du Dragon, Paris 75006, or write to contact@artquamanima.com.