About

The Multimodal Institute is a project, not an organisation. It has no legal existence and no premises of its own: the laboratory is the studio itself, at Art Quam Anima, Paris, and publications are issued through AQA Publishing. The Institute is the name given to the documentation and publication layer of a single artistic practice, that of Arnaud Quercy.

It exists because works are not finished when they leave the studio. A painting holds decisions — about colour, form, material, perception, music — that stay unstated unless someone states them. The Institute is where they are stated, and kept. Every work catalogued at artquamanima.com generates a set of nanopublications: material descriptions, colour readings, practitioner claims, notes — archived on Zenodo and Archive.org.

Four Ways of Looking

The corpus is organized through four epistemological lenses — four ways of approaching the same body of work:

• Observations — What is there: material descriptions, records, and daily reading notes.
• Measurements — What can be extracted: colour relationships, spatial coherence, computational image analysis, and the distance between prescribed and realised colour.
• Practice — What the artist knows: studio method, curatorial reasoning, exhibition history, and the lived experience of making.
• Theory — What is argued: propositions and papers stating the method and the conditions under which it would be wrong.

Method

Ideamorphism is a working method, not a theory: institute a rule that connects two domains without claiming to translate between them, execute it to the end, and observe the gap. It explains nothing and reveals nothing. It produces. The current statement of the method is Seven Propositions.

Its main instrument is a codex connecting harmony to colour — a deterministic rule built under a real perceptual constraint, since Arnaud Quercy is colour-blind, and executed across 379 paintings. The rule does not uncover a correspondence; it institutes one in the act of stating it. What can be measured afterwards is the distance between what the rule prescribes and what the hand did. That instrument is specified in The Prescribed and the Realized.

Lineage

That reception is creative — that a work exceeds its author's intention, that plural readings are legitimate — was established by Roman Ingarden in 1931 and named by Umberto Eco in 1962. Arnaud Quercy reached it through practice, and late. What belongs to this project is narrower: a rule built under an incapacity, executed to the end, and an instrument that measures the gap.

Rights

Documentation and research texts are published under Creative Commons licences. Reproductions of the artworks themselves are All Rights Reserved — rights managed by ADAGP, Paris.

Explore

The full research corpus is searchable through the Research Index. Published catalogs and papers are available at publishing.artquamanima.com.

Contact

For inquiries, collaboration, or institutional partnerships: contact@artquamanima.com.