Oliver Beer Turns Sound Into Paint In A Spellbinding London Exhibition Interview with the artist
By Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle
What does sound look like? For Oliver Beer, it is not a metaphor but a material. Rather than painting representations of music, he allows sound itself to create the image, using precisely calibrated acoustic frequencies to move ultra-fine pigments into luminous, rippling abstractions in his compact London studio under a railway arch near Waterloo Station. By playing specific musical notes through speakers positioned beneath a horizontal canvas, he forces the dry powder into pulsating, geometric waveforms that correspond directly to the harmonic frequencies of the sound. Once these fleeting, undulating patterns emerge, he fixes them into permanent, complex images on canvas via a secret technique. The result is his acclaimed “Resonance Paintings”—mesmerizing works in which invisible vibrations become tangible fields of color and form.
Trained as a composer in London before studying fine art at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art and film theory at the Sorbonne in Paris, Beer has built one of contemporary art’s most original practices by revealing the hidden musicality of objects, architecture and space. His search for resonance has taken him from the Sydney Opera House and Paris’ Centre Pompidou to one of humanity’s oldest artistic sites—the prehistoric painted caves of Dordogne in southwest France—where he uncovered a striking relationship between Paleolithic imagery and sound: early cave artists may have selected specific sites for their paintings based on the cave’s natural acoustic resonance.
Beer’s findings culminated in “Resonance Project: The Cave”, his lauded eight-screen immersive video opera that captures the haunting polyphony created by eight diverse performers singing their earliest musical memories within the ancient space. The singers featured include Canadian-American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright; French chamber-pop musician Woodkid; French bass classical singer Jean-Christophe Brizard; Danish pop musician eee gee; Japanese soprano singer Michiko Takahashi; Mélissa Laveaux, a Canadian singer-songwriter of Haitian descent; Mo’Ju, a cross-genre musician of Wiradjuri and Filipino heritage; and Hamed Sinno, a Lebanese-American composer and performer. After having premiered at the 2024 Lyon Biennale, “Resonance Project: The Cave” will embark on an international tour this year, with its first stop at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki this November.
Currently on view through July 31 at Thaddaeus Ropac London, Beer’s solo show “The Sky in the Cave” marks the latest chapter in that journey. Bringing together monumental “Resonance Paintings”, music of his composition for the eight voices recorded in the cave played from a vinyl record, and a 16-mm film mixing footage of the prehistoric cave paintings with his own painting process, the exhibition transforms the gallery into an immersive environment where sound and image become inseparable. Ancient mineral pigments once used by cave painters dissolve into radiant blues, pinks and yellows of celestial color, tracing a poetic voyage from the depths of the earth towards open sky.
The outcome of at least nine months of solid painting, the body of work is as visually arresting as it is intellectually ambitious, inviting viewers to experience listening not simply as an auditory act but as a profoundly physical, emotional and shared encounter. It is a fitting culmination of Beer’s lifelong exploration into the invisible forces that connect voice, memory, space and image across millennia. I sit down with the artist to discuss replacing the brush with vibration and transforming invisible sound waves into captivating works inspired by music, memory and prehistory.
