Tracing Universal Frequencies, Oliver Beer Makes Sound Visible
By Elisa Carollo
Since art history embraced the possibilities of abstraction, numerous artists have tried to translate music—the most abstract of all creative expressions—into painting and other visual forms. This has led to both highly emotional and rigorously scientific attempts to translate music’s intangible structures into forms and symbols. In a sense, this process began with the development of musical notation itself: a linguistic code of notes and rhythms that transforms frequencies, vibrations and temporal patterns into codified signs. This impulse achieved an elevated form, truly suspended between the linguistic and the imaginative in Kandinsky’s most successful mature works.
More recently, British artist Oliver Beer seems to have found an even deeper way to let sound, with its frequencies and vibrations, create entire painterly spaces. Beer studied musical composition at the Academy of Contemporary Music in London before attending the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, and later explored the potential of images and sound in motion while studying film theory at the Sorbonne in Paris, and consequently has a mature understanding of how sound vibrates between and through bodies.
Inspired by time spent in the Lascaux caves, “The Sky in the Cave” at Thaddaeus Ropac in London invites visitors to pursue a multisensory journey through the space, following frequencies as they materialize in different forms through Beer’s signature Resonance Paintings, monumental 16mm films and soundscapes. The gallery becomes an immersive environment in which sound and image are experienced fluidly as inseparable, both emerging from a similar blending of the subconscious and the sensorial.
Rather than depicting sound, Beer’s Resonance Paintings are physically shaped by it, as vibrations act directly on pigment and frequencies are translated through the alchemy of painting. In the process, a fleeting, intangible moment of sonic flow becomes a permanent image and a tangible physical experience, connecting voice, music, memory and matter while highlighting the vital entanglement among them. “One thing I learned when I first began painting this way was how clear and powerful the relationship between music and image could be. Why not crystallize that and allow people to see an accumulation of sound?” Beer reflected during the London Gallery Weekend opening.
