Oliver Beer Resonance Painting (Long Hot Summer), 2022

The Resonance Painting series visualises the resonant harmonies that Beer cultivates through his sculptural, painting and performance practices. He explains, ‘[p]eople don’t realise that music has physical form: if you could see music vibrating air around us you would see beautiful geometries in three dimensions.’ Works such as Resonance Painting (Long Hot Summer), allow the artist to capture these geometrical patterns on canvas.

The paintings are created by positioning a speaker beneath a horizontally-oriented canvas upon which dry, powdered pigment has been scattered. Beer plays musical notes that cause the canvas to vibrate – in this example, ‘Long Hot Summer’ by The Style Council – moving and shaping the pigment into visual representations of the sound waves. These appear on the surface of the works in undulating, geometric patterns, which are subsequently frozen in place using a unique fixing technique developed by the artist.