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 geometric forms are embedded in the way we hear.
Watch a video of the artist discussing his new Resonance Paintings and his painting process, as well as the video opera, realised inside a prehistoric painted cave in the Dordogne and presented at the most recent Lyon Biennale. This music provided the harmonies used by Beer to make his most recent Resonance Paintings.
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 my paintbrush’.
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.
The idea of painting using music, painting using sound, was so natural and so intuitive that when I started to explore it, I realised that in the same way that music has infinite harmonic possibilities, those harmonies can also become an infinite series of visual possibilities on a canvas.
— Oliver Beer
Beer’s new body of Resonance Paintings is an evolution of his monumental video installation The Cave, first presented at the recent Lyon Biennale. 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 emerge directly from this music – translating the sonic vibrations and harmonies of The Cave into a visual language, and thereby 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.
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
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 is 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.
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.
What Oliver Beer is inventing and inaugurating today is a musical sound experience that is neither instrumental nor artificial, but an organic sonic vibration of the spaces of a Palaeolithic cave with the works that have been inscribed there for millennia. It is an organic and sensitive revival of spaces unjustly considered to be definitively deserted by the living arts. Life and its breath are returning to these places. It is the most generous invitation to revisit the Palaeolithic painted caves.
— Jean-Michel Geneste, archaeologist, previous Principal Conservator of Lascaux and the former Director of the Centre National de la Préhistoire in Périgueux.
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 the sound waves. 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.
Looking at the Resonance Paintings, you feel a strange closeness to the invisible. Each canvas captures an ephemeral moment – that when the human voice sets the space in vibration – and freezes it in the pictorial matter. The experience is unsettling: you get the feeling that the sound is still there, suspended, like a wave that continues to vibrate beneath the surface.
— Jean-Michel Geneste, Life and its Breath in Palaeolithic Cave Paintings, 2025
Download Life and its Breath in Palaeolithic Cave Paintings (2025), an essay on Oliver Beer’s Resonance Paintings: The Cave by Jean-Michel Geneste, archaeologist, previous Principal Conservator of Lascaux and the former Director of the Centre National de la Préhistoire in Périgueux.
