Ephemeral Sand Sculptures on Salou Beach

In August 2022, Arnaud Quercy transformed the Mediterranean shores of Salou into a fleeting open-air gallery, creating a series of sand bas-reliefs that existed only until the tide returned to claim them. Over ten days, the Spanish coastline became both studio and exhibition space for works that paid homage to jazz legends and the eternal spirit of travel—ephemeral monuments shaped by hand and erased by sea, celebrating impermanence as artistic statement. Working at monumental scale directly on the shoreline, Quercy positioned the beach itself as collaborator, with tidal action serving as final curator.

The exhibition emerged from Quercy's ongoing exploration of transience and creative immediacy. Two monumental reliefs—Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker—translated the improvisational soul of bebop into sculptural form. Each 150 × 120 cm piece captured the dissonance, rhythm, and elegance of these musical titans through sharp contours and geometric abstraction. The Parker tribute rendered Bird's spirit as an angular form caught mid-flight, while the Monk portrait preserved the musician's iconic silhouette—trademark hat and angular features—alongside abstracted piano keys anchoring the composition's lower register.

Complementing these jazz tributes, Quercy created a trio of introspective works exploring the spirit of travel as part of the Mediterranean Echoes collection. The Woman Reading captured stillness and absorption through geometric abstraction and cubist influences—a figure bent in concentration, hands cradling a book. The Sailer employed deliberate perceptual ambiguity: an abstract composition that transforms when mentally inverted, revealing what initially appears as a geometric face to be a fleet of boats on the horizon. The Traveler presented a stylized face in profile gazing toward an unseen horizon, embodying the introspection that accompanies every journey.

The exhibition functioned simultaneously as performance and meditation, drawing tourists and locals into shared contemplation where art and nature intersected. None of the sculptures survived beyond their creation—each was reclaimed by seawater, wind, or curious footsteps within hours. Yet in this impermanence lay their essential power: the reminder that beauty, like memory or jazz improvisation, achieves its fullest life precisely because it cannot last. Documentation through archival photography now serves as the lasting artifact, preserving what the ocean could not.

Artist Statement

This body of work emerged from a desire to surrender control to natural forces—to create knowing that destruction was not merely possible but inevitable. The beach at Salou offered the perfect collaboration: sand that held form just long enough to be witnessed, and tides that served as the final curator of each piece.

In sculpting Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, I sought to translate jazz's essential qualities into three-dimensional form—the tension between structure and improvisation, the beauty of notes that exist only in their moment of sounding. Sand bas-relief became the visual equivalent of musical impermanence: shapes that could be contemplated but never possessed. The Monk portrait preserved his iconic silhouette alongside abstracted piano keys, while Bird took flight one last time as an angular geometric form caught in eternal motion.

The travel series—The Woman Reading, The Sailer, The Traveler—explored a different register of transience: the inner journeys we undertake while moving through physical space. Each figure represented a moment of suspension between departure and arrival, that liminal state where transformation becomes possible. The Sailer's deliberate perceptual ambiguity—face becoming fleet, portrait becoming seascape—captured how perspective itself shifts during travel. That these meditations on journey would themselves be carried away by the sea felt not like loss but like completion.

Logistics

The exhibition took place August 1–10, 2022, on Salou Beach near Passeig de Jaume I on Spain's Costa Daurada. Works were visible daily from sunrise to sunset, weather permitting. Admission was free and open to the public along the open coastline with no reservation required. As ephemeral works, individual sculptures were visible only during and shortly after their creation before being reclaimed by tidal action. All works now exist solely through archival documentation. For inquiries, visit

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