Resonance Paintings: The Cave
Solo Show
1 March to 19 April 2025 | Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, Paris, France
7 Rue Debelleyme, 75003 Paris, France
Tuesday — Saturday 10 am to 7 pm

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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

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Following his installation at the 17th Biennale de Lyon (2024–25), created in the Palaeolithic painted caves of Dordogne, Oliver Beer brings his 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 abstraction is embedded in the way we hear.​

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.

Beer’s new body of Resonance Paintings is an evolution of his monumental video installation The Cave, first presented at the recent Lyon Biennale. In The Cave, 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. 

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The new paintings on view in the Paris Marais gallery emerge directly from this music – translating the sonic vibrations and harmonies of the cave into a visual language, 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. However, rather than interpreting sound visually, Beer allows it to directly shape the work itself, making vibration an active agent of creation. This transformation of sound into image reveals how the geometry of music is deeply embedded in the history of abstract painting, and demonstrates a connection that spans centuries – from prehistoric cave echoes to contemporary abstraction.

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For his most recent Resonance Paintings, Beer has researched and included the deep black and red ochre pigments used in the prehistoric cave paintings – some of the oldest pigments used by humankind. Expanding his palette from the airy tones of blue and white seen in previous works, in the paintings on view, these earthy shades blend into brighter, celestial blues and pinks. 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. 

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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. 

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The first floor of the exhibition features a video documenting the making of the Resonance Paintings and The Cave, including footage of Beer’s painting process. 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. 

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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 sound waves as they fill the gallery. 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.

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