Oliver Beer 'Painting with Sound

By Stéphane Renault

British composer and artist Oliver Beer has been invited by the Musée d'art moderne de Paris to present Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices and his video opera Resonance Project: The Cave is one of the highlights of the Lyon Biennale.

The Musée d'art moderne de Paris (MAM) is showing your project Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices. Could you tell us about it?

Oliver Beer: For several years I have been working with children and young people, inviting them to contribute drawings to an animation or film project. [...] Each young participant will reinterpret one of these works in their own unique style.

This approach will stimulate the imagination of the 4,000 children who will ultimately take part, not only by reinterpreting a painting, but also by taking part in a composition workshop in which they will be able to project their personal inspiration from the artwork through their voices and musical instruments.

The title A Thousand Voices refers to Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which explores the 'monomyth'—the concept that all human myths are linked by a universal narrative.'

At the Lyon Biennale, you present an immersive installation with eight synchronized cinema screens and sixteen speakers, entitled Resonance Project: The Cave. This video opera includes a new composition and an octet of singers: Rufus Wainwright, Woodkid, eee gee, Mélissa Laveaux, Hamed Sinno, Jean Christophe Brizard, Mo'Ju and Michiko Takahashi. How did you approach composing for these eight voices?

I was lucky enough to gain access to the Font-de-Gaume cave in the Dordogne and I suspected that I could make the cave 'sing' as if it were a giant seashell. [...] The concept was that the cave itself would become the tuning fork; within its walls, F is the note that resonates most strongly.

This immersive experience takes the listener back to the childhoods of these performers and of humanity itself. [...] In places where voices seem to emerge from the earth itself, our distant ancestors painted on the walls around 14,000 BC.

In Lyon, you are also exhibiting a new series of Resonance Paintings, created  using sound waves to move pigments across the canvas - a method that uses sound as a brushto capture the physical manifestation of sound waves.

These paintings reflect my continuing interest in visualizing and making tangible the materiality of sound. [...] I selected the finest powdered pigments and sprinkled them on a flat canvas while playing pure tones in my studio.

A given note produces a specific wavelength, which creates a unique pattern. [...] Through these paintings, I wanted to embody the journey from darkness to light.