Oliver Beer Resonance Painting (Move Your Feet), 2022

Oliver Beer’s Resonance Painting series visualises the harmonies that the artist 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 (Move Your Feet) (2022) allow the artist to capture these geometrical patterns on canvas.

 

Each painting is named after a song that Beer was listening to at the period of making the work, in this example, ‘Move Your Feet’ by the Danish pop duo Junior Senior. The work is created by positioning a speaker beneath a horizontallyoriented canvas upon which dry, powdered pigment has been scattered. Beer plays musical notes that cause the canvas to vibrate, moving and shaping the pigment into visual representations of the sound waves. These appear on the surface of the works in undulating patterns and are subsequently frozen in place using a unique fixing technique developed by the artist. In this way, he produces a visual record of the music, freezing the intangible medium in time and space.