Oliver Beer, Resonance Paintings: The Cave 2 Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

Resonance Paintings: The Cave 2
Installation @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Oliver Beer's paintings are mesmeric. Walking into Thaddaeus Ropac's Marais gallery was like entering a mystical space of worship. The experience was made haunting and mythical by the sound filling the main gallery space, the walls adorned with paintings, carrying the visitor into an almost transcendental state. Hung with one painting on the south wall and three on each of the side walls, the paintings could be mistaken for a transposition or translation of religious scenes, an abstraction of figures ascending from earth to the heavens. Moreover, the large paintings along side walls in the main gallery remind of triptychs on an altar.Wisps of earthy pigment drift upwards to blue and white skies. 

Oliver Beer, Resonance Painting (Winter Morning), 2025

Beer worked with singers in the Paleolithic painted caves of Dordogne, where he discovered that the voices had a unique resonance. The sound recordings were then placed beneath loose pigment covered canvases, the vibrations of the music moving pigments to create abstract forms, paintings that are literally a visualization of music, in images that remind of the mysterious cave paintings. On entry to the main gallery, I didn't know whether to look at or listen to the paintings. Inside the gallery, the music that inspired the work was played, inviting the visitor to drift into the spirit of the works. In the breaks between soundtracks, in the quiet of the space, we were shown that the paintings function in time. Beer's process is slow and develops over time, processing and then re-using the sound recorded in the Lascaux caves. Similarly, the experience of the paintings gathers profundity over the time spent with them.

Oliver Beer, Resonance Painting (Sweet Wood), 2025

Beer's paintings not only merge music/sound and painting, but they are filtered through history. In an interview, Beer tells of how the sonic vibrations in the caves become increasingly resonant when his microphone is closer to the drawings that have existed for thousands of years. Thus, the paintings become tracings of a history, even if the exact time period is not clear. We can only ever know that a history is behind the drawings, not what that history is. In addition, when recording, Beer discovered that certain frequencies of the human voice stimulate sounds from the cave walls, creating sounds that transcend those produced by the singers. The mystical sounds are thus created through the stories of the walls over thousands of years. Simultaneously, the sound filling the gallery space is reinforced as placeless, having travelled across distant times, belonging outside of the material world.

Oliver Beer, Resonance Paintings (Shadows), 2025

That said, there is also something very physical, even corporeal about the works. Having recently rewatched David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), the pulsations and vibrations of pigment formed on the surface of Beer's canvases reminded me of scars on bodies from accidents, skin ripped open and sewn back together, trauma traced on skin. While there is nothing traumatic about the paintings, we remember that the sense of the past is heightened by the traces of what took place before. In turn, though we do not know what happened to the Aurignacians (who painted the cave walls 15,000 years ago), we do know that they disappeared, moved on, perhaps because of climate change or disease. The darkness and lightness of history are thus brought to mind in these superb works.

Resonance Paintings: The Cave 2
Installation @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Beer also talks about how his paintings speak to the history of art, in particular, twentieth century abstraction. Abstract painters have always been inspired by music, particularly in their search for painting beyond materiality and representation. Beer's works move into the space of complete abstraction when we are lifted up and away by them, as if to another realm, all the time maintaining their materiality. Beer's abstractions are both conceptually inspired by music and reach this transcendental ethereal space created through music. Similarly, as I say, Beer literally takes us to this realm through exploring the space between the two mediums, encouraging us both to listen and to look, simultaneously. As such, thanks to the synergetic space of image and sound, Beer's Resonance Paintings exceed the limits of abstract painting.

Ryoji Ikeda, Continuum @ Centre Pompidou

Ryoji Ikeda, Code-verse, 2018

Ryoji Ikeda is back at the Centre Pompidou with two new compositions, Code-versa, and A [continuum], both from 2018, in an exhibition in Galerie 3 titled Continuum. I find much contemporary digital visual art to be unconvincing, primarily because it is so often an image shot with a digital camera that does very little with the medium. Ikeda’s work is everything that the run of the mill digital art is not. It’s complex, intricate, multivalent and best of all, it pushes the boundaries of sound and image, aesthetics and technology.

Ryoji Ikeda, Code-verse, 2018

Ikeda’s work is impressive because it works on multiple levels. On its intellectual dimension, the artist polyphonic compositions “compress vast, dense mass of data together,” and pushe a single pitch (in this case, a piece in which five hyper-directional speakers emit a piercing, almost nauseating sound, the infinite tones of the note A) into infinity through treating frequencies as pure materials. And on another level, Ikeda's creations are endlessly fascinating and invite the computer, sound and music illiterate to enjoy them physically and mentally. It’s difficult to pull ourselves away from the pieces as we become mesmerized by a search for logic and order, for beginnings and endings that don’t exist, and for the perfect place from which to experience them.  

Ryoji Ikeda, Code-verse, 2018

Not being among the viewers who understand the computer coding that creates the sound/image manipulations, I can only give the layperson version of the exhibition. In the hypnotic code verse our attention is held over time as we are sutured into the dizzying, multi-dimensional optical art created through the permutations of sound and images resulting from Ikeda’s computer coding. The long screen moves through what start to resemble images of an interstellar out of space journey seen from the cockpit of a flying machine, leading us into another world. At other times, the icons moving across the screen looking like a creeping cursor, and at still others, the shifting to a two dimensional floor that transforms into a sky, and then shifts perspective to take us back to three dimensional time travel.

Ryoji Ikeda, A [continuum], 2018

In the second white-carpeted and white-walled room, the five hyper-directional speakers emit the infinite permutations of 'A' resulting in a work that will never repeat itself across the ten week run of the exhibition. The sound is piercing to our ears and penetrates our consciousness, leading to a corporeal experience on the slow path to headaches and nausea. Ikeda explains the noise of the installation to be generated through subjecting his data (in this case the multiple instances of the note 'A' played by orchestras and musical instruments around the world) through his individually coded programs. The end result is a manipulation of time and space through the materiality of sound.

Ryoji Ikeda, A [continuum], 2018

Ryoji Ikeda, A [continuum], 2018

Afterwards, I went upstairs to the Chagall. Lissitzky, Malévitch exhibition (which is not about their work, but rather, the story of the Vitebsk School of Art which Chagall opened in 1919). The exhibition is mildly interesting, but what consumed my thoughts as I walked around was the fact that Ikeda could well be understood as a twenty-first century El Lissitzky. Certainly both artists are looking to push the boundaries of the medium of their respective moment, they are looking to move beyond what is possible in and through representation, moving into and exposing dimensions of creation and consequent existence not yet articulated. The major difference between the two being that for El Lissitzky art should always focus on its political concern, whereas Ikeda’s codings seem to stay on the level of the aesthetic. Which is not to say that Ikeda’s work couldn’t be used in the service of social critique, but he is not using technology against itself as were the great Soviet abstract painters of the early twentieth century.

Beat Generation @ Centre Pompidou

Bruce Baillie, Castro Street, 1966

The real joy of this exhibition, and in my mind, the main reason to go, are the rarely screened films. The exhibition includes lots of photographs of Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs, Corso and all sorts of other characters, there’s the original typescript of On the Road laid out down the centre of the first rooms, a handful of Burroughs machines, a sampling of Frank’s The Americans, and other treats. But it’s the opportunity to see, for example, two of Bruce Conner’s never screened films, Looking for Mushrooms (1962) and Crossroads (1976) that make the exhibition exciting. Even films that are available such as Bruce Baillie’s Castro Street are so rarely screened, and it’s a treat to see them in large format. Even if they are shown on DVD, as opposed to projected, they are absorbing viewing. I also loved the anonymous footage of Vietnam War protests in New York City for its examples of early video. The colour is unlike anything we would see today. And films by Christopher MacLean, Burroughs, Bruce Baillie make great viewing.

Beat Generation exhibition view
Kerouac's On the Road laid out in the middle

I also have to admit that even though I loved seeing these films, many of them are not Beat Generation films. Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959), and the collaborations made with Antony Balch for The Cut Ups (1966), and maybe a couple of others can be seen as Beat films-including Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1964) and other films, and Harry Smith’s great experiments-- but many of the others screening in Gallery One are not. The late 50s and early 60s was an incredibly furtive moment in American filmmaking, so there were lots of filmmakers and artists making films at the time, experimenting with the medium, doing wild and wacky things. But Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie and Bruce Conner for example are not Beat filmmakers.

 

Kerouac Paraphernalia ... is this really that interesting?

Which leads to what for me was the biggest problem with the exhibition. It uses images of all kinds—photos, films, paintings, graphic art, drawings as documents to exhibit social and cultural and political beliefs. There is no attention to the artistic value of some of these documents. The whole point of the Beat Generation was that they challenged the social and political domain through experimentation in form and aesthetic of their chosen media. Moreover, for the filmmakers such as Smith and Rice, they weren’t just tripping out on drugs and making their experience into films, but their films contain a highly sophisticated philosophy regarding around the use of experimental film (as opposed to other media). The critical ways that these artists manipulated form and aesthetic is completely lost in this exhibition. Similarly, the exquisite use of the camera by Robert Frank in The Americans or even by Burroughs in his never-exhibited photographs is completely lost here. These guys changed art in a way that Duchamp had forty years before them, and because there is no discussion of the aesthetic, there’s no way of knowing the influence and impact they had.

 

Unknown Photographer, Burroughs in the Villa Mouniria Garden, Tangiers. 

I am always irritated by these exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou because of the conventional mainstream vision they offer of a movement such as the Beat Generation. A visitor to this exhibition could well come away with the belief that there were no women, at all, working in this time. From what the exhibition tells us, if women existed in this world, they did so as accessories to the men’s genius. The only relationships that are given significance as having a formative influence on the writers and artists are their gay male lovers. There were in fact a whole host of women who were producing and collaborating and inspiring these works, but they are not shown here.

 

Harry Smith

Lastly, the all-over-the-place nature of the exhibition really dilutes the power of what the Beats were doing. Rather than going for the all out summer exhibition bonanza, I would have liked something that was more sensitive to the relationship between all these different movements, art works, artists, art forms and a much more nuanced placement of the movement vis-à-vis political and historical events. It is true that footage of the Vietnam War, for example, is gorgeous, and yes, it’s going on at the same time as the Beats develop their ideas and work, but more information on their actual engagement with it would have been more satisfying the events as something like background scenery.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014 @ Palais de Tokyo

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

British wonderboy Ed Atkins has an installation at the Palais de Tokyo that anyone who claims to keep up with the art world will need to see. At 32, Atkins has made quite an impression on those who matter with exhibitions at MoMA, a single artist show at the Serpentine’s Sackler Gallery, a solo exhibit at the Tate Modern, the ICA, Venice, and the list goes on. The impressive CV was enough to entice Irina and I to see Bastards following our visit next door to what was, by comparison, the genteel Fontana exhibition.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

Ribbons (2014), adapted for the Palais de Tokyo, is a three channel, high definition video installation in which Atkins explores the latest language in image production. Morphing between filmed footage and digital imagery, Atkins uses everything from traditional video and cinematic strategies —blurring, lens-flares, scratches, sound and image editing — to the latest computer graphics for which he apparently does all his own coding. There’s no doubt that the technical dimension of Atkins work is inspiring. His command of the image and its multi-form production is impressive, speaking to the agility of image integration and technical literacy of his generation. Likewise the form is exciting in its reflection of the way that we receive and process visual information.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

Irina and I, two women of a different generation, may not have been able to identify with or in the images, but both of us were convinced that Atkins’ Ribbons was more relevant and more interesting than Godard’s latest film, Adieu au Language (2014), a film we had seen the week before. Atkins, unlike Godard who claims to converse with the latest image technology, actually uses the most contemporary visual and sonic language as he moves in and out of as well as along a spectrum of digital possibilities. Atkins creates a more convincing adieu to language than Godard’s soporific dabble with 3D imaging. Words for Atkins are text messages, made visual before disappearing to be replaced by the next words or image, they are reduced to marginalia, scribbles on a body, snatches of poetry, quotations emptied of meaning, unfinished.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

The protagonist — who seems to shift in and out of identification with Atkins is a troll, apparently. But mostly, he is obsessed with his sexuality, distractedly getting involved with those great British pastimes — getting drunk and falling over—until he is deflated, literally, through computer generated animation. The Palais de Tokyo identified the character in the three narratives, on three large discrete screens, his voice resonating through the space, as Atkins. But it isn’t, it’s an actor. Admittedly though, the identity of the actor is not important, in fact, the confusion of identity reinforces the anonymity of the artist. It might as well be Atkins, his alter ego, bellowing with pride and then deflated, defaced or effaced. He is often surrounded by pint glasses, pouring drinks, being drunk, getting high, sticking his tongue, his nose, then later, his penis through a hole, wedging himself under the table. It is all about Atkins even if he is not in the videos.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014

The sound for the exhibition was brilliant. When Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion was sung, the three voices resonated and intertwined through the sound of the three different screens. And then, at other times, we are completely surrounded by the sound when standing before the screen to which it relates, and there is no interruption of the sound from the other screens. Bach mutates into burps and farts and then Randy Newman who is, in turn, interrupted by email alerts.

If technically Atkins’ installation is brilliant, even mesmerizing, conceptually it lacks maturity. We also become aware of Atkins’ identity through the musings and convolutions of sound and image. With his obsessions of drinking, speaking, fucking, with an occasional search for reality, Ribbons comes across as the work of a young, ego-centric heterosexual artist who does not yet have the depth to allow for the resonance and profundity of those he quotes, such as Blanchot and Lacan. As captivating as it was, the irony wasn’t strong enough to convince me that this is anything but a straight boy’s glib view of the world. Atkins could develop his work in a number of different directions, and his success as an artist will depend on which of these he chooses. But for the moment, to me, he’s still a 32 year old young man with work to do. 

All Images Courtesy of the Artist