PARIS.- Following his critically acclaimed installation at the 17th Biennale de Lyon (2024–25), created in the Palaeolithic painted caves of Dordogne, British artist Oliver Beer brings his groundbreaking Resonance Paintings to Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais for the first time. This exhibition deepens his conceptual exploration of the hidden ties between collective musical memory and visual expression, revealing how sound can shape form and how abstraction is embedded in the way we hear.
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Beer is known for pushing the boundaries between visual art, music and space. In his Resonance Paintings series – developed over years of research and experimentation – he employs sound vibrations to compose precise forms on canvas, ‘using sound as his paintbrush’, as he puts it. Drawing on both his musical and artistic training, Beer plays precise harmonies through loudspeakers positioned beneath horizontally oriented canvases scattered with dry pigment, adjusting the frequencies to produce swelling, rippling patterns that correspond to the musical vibrations. He captures these dynamic forms using a fixing technique he has developed, binding the pigment to the canvas to transform the ephemeral shape of sound into something visible and lasting.
Beer’s new body of Resonance Paintings is an evolution of his monumental video installation The Cave, first presented at the recent Lyon Biennale. In The Cave, eight cinema screens showed eight performers, each singing their first musical memory inside one of the best-preserved prehistoric painted caves of the Dordogne. Beer taught the singers to stimulate the cave’s natural acoustics with their voices, activating its resonant frequencies to make it sing back like the rim of a wine glass with the tip of a finger. He meticulously recomposed their remembered melodies, weaving them together into a layered polyphony that takes the listener on a vivid musical journey.
The new paintings on view in the Paris Marais gallery emerge directly from this music – translating the sonic vibrations and harmonies of The Cave into a visual language, deepening the dialogue between sound, space and form. In doing so, Beer follows in the lineage of 20th and 21st-century abstract painters who sought to express musical structures through form and colour. However, rather than interpreting sound visually, Beer allows it to directly shape the work itself, making vibration an active agent of creation. This transformation of sound into image reveals how the geometry of music is deeply embedded in the history of abstract painting, and demonstrates a connection that spans centuries – from prehistoric cave echoes to contemporary abstraction.
For his most recent Resonance Paintings, Beer has researched and included the deep black and red ochre pigments used in the prehistoric cave paintings – some of the oldest pigments used by humankind. Expanding his palette from the airy tones of blue and white seen in previous works, in the paintings on view, these earthy shades blend into brighter, celestial blues and pinks. Beer describes how the progression of colour from ‘earth to sky’ recreates the powerful experience of exploring and singing in the cave: the sense of depth and darkness as one enters, followed by the transcendental encounter with the polychrome paintings within and the mysterious acoustics that he and his fellow musicians teased out of its walls.
The presentation of the Resonance Paintings on the ground floor of the gallery will be accompanied by music from a one-off vinyl record created for the exhibition. A stereo mix of the eight voices heard in The Cave, it further elucidates the paintings’ origins within the musical harmonies wielded by Beer to create them. Immersing the paintings in the very sounds from which they stem, the soundtrack is a reminder to visitors that, if they could visualise the sound waves emanating from the vinyl as they invisibly fill the gallery, they would resemble the undulating forms of the pigment on the canvases.
The first floor of the exhibition features a video documenting the making of the Resonance Paintings and The Cave, including footage of Beer’s painting process. Over three years, the artist repeatedly returned to the cave to conduct vocal tests, identifying precise locations and musical notes that triggered its natural resonances. From this, he created a ‘harmonic map’ of the cave, presented as a cyanotype in the exhibition. He found that the cave consistently resonated at a low F, which became a ‘tuning fork’ uniting the singers’ diverse voices. Working alongside archaeologists, he also discovered that the cave’s strongest resonances occur in areas with prehistoric paintings, raising the question of whether early artists had intentionally chosen these sites for their acoustic properties.
Emerging from the interplay of voice, space, and time, the Resonance Paintings give shape to sound, capturing the echoes of lullabies sung within the acoustics of a prehistoric cave. They distil the vibrations of the human voice – our first and most instinctive instrument – into visual form. Just as The Cave made the site’s natural resonances audible, these paintings make harmony visible, tracing the contours of sound waves as they fill the gallery. What seems like abstraction is, in fact, a direct imprint of musical structure – bridging past and present, sound and image, the deeply personal and the universal.
Studying and exploring the paintings and acoustics of these prehistoric caves reaffirmed for me just how deeply connected music and imagery have always been. We don’t just hear sound – we bathe in its forms and it moves every atom in our bodies. The Resonance Paintings are my way of composing images that make that connection visible, showing how musical harmony and abstraction have always been intertwined, whether in a prehistoric cave or in a contemporary painting. — Oliver Beer
Oliver Beer trained in musical composition at the Academy of Contemporary Music in London before attending the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and studying cinematic theory at the Sorbonne, Paris. This musical background is reflected in his live performances, films, installations, paintings and sculptures, which reveal the hidden acoustic properties of vessels, bodies, and architectural environments. The artist’s familial relationships often inform multi-disciplinary works that engage with intimate yet universal concerns, such as the sounds and memories contained within personal possessions and collective musical heritage. Beer explores the unifying potential of music that resonates across history, generations and cultures, as embodied in objects and spaces.
Based in London and Paris, Beer joined Thaddaeus Ropac in 2013. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Met Breuer and MoMA PS1, New York; Opéra Garnier, Centre Pompidou, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Palace of Versailles; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art and MONA, Australia; West Bund Museum and Long Museum, Shanghai; WIELS, Brussels; and the Sydney, Istanbul, and Venice biennials. The artist has also held residencies at the Villa Albertine, Palais de Tokyo, the Watermill Centre, Sydney Opera House and Fondation d'entreprise Hermès.
In 2024, Beer presented his The Cave installation at the 17th Biennale de Lyon and a series of Resonance Paintings reinterpreting Claude Monet’s Water Lilies at FRAC Normandie for the Normandie Impressionniste festival. His work is currently on view as part of the exhibition The Life of Things at the Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, until November 2025. His solo exhibition Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices will be on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris beginning 4 April 2025, and he will be featured in a group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, opening 26 March 2025.
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