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.

Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen @ Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Josephsohn vue par Albert Oehlen
Installation View

I dragged my feet a little to this exhibition; the sculptures looked interesting but unvaried in the posters around town. It took time, walking around, but over the course of a couple of hours, I was charmed and increasingly fascinated by Josephsohn's bold and intensely emotional works. Likewise, the sculptures gained in complexity over the course of my two hour visit. The exhibition was curated by Swiss artist Albert Oehlen who wanted to privilege the materiality of the sculptures. Given the physical immensity of Josephsohn's work, and their enormous presence, it would be difficult to privilege any other aspect! 

Josephsohn vue par Albert Oehlen
Installation View

The list of Josephsohn's references is diverse, including Egyptian funerary statues, Giacometti, Brancusi, Fautrier, styles and forms that are visible in the plaster and sometimes brass sculptures. The figures are moulded, pressed, developed by touch and pinch and squeeze. However, unlike his contemporaries, Josephsohn's sculptures are absolute, resolute figures in the world, taking up space in their particular environment, not about to move for anyone. The sculptures are also formally very different from the work of an artist such as Giacometti: Josephsohn's figures are formed by building up the surface, not attacking it and scraping in a search for perfection. They are also reminiscent of Rodin's oversized public commissions. Heaving figures, often leaning left or right such as late Untitled bodies and torsos reminded me of Rodin's Burghers of Calais, always dragging.

Josephsohn vue par Albert Oehlen
Installation View

At first sight, the forms are a complete mess: they are unmistakeably human, but the proportions of torsos, heads, and facial features are often skewed. The faces are particularly deformed, sometimes only a protruding triangle as a nose, a ridge beneath as a mouth is all we are given. And yet it is enough. We clearly recognize the human likeness. There is also a distinct difference between the male and the female forms. The male figures legs and torso are more defined than the women's. And however stopped the man is, he's often in motion. We do not always notice the details because the overwhelming sense that we get is one of loneliness and loss. Always, the figure is along on its plinth, even if it interacts with other works. Thanks to Oehlen's stunning curation, they form communities, repeated, always with a slight difference. 

Hans Josephsohn, Untitled, 2005

Contemporary artist Oehlen's curation is itself a work of art, emphasizing as it sets out to, Josephsohn's materials and the materiality of the figures. As I say, it would be difficult not to focus on the material because the plaster and brass are so sensuous. In many ways, the sculptures are about the material and the form that results from gouging, pitting, plying. It is as if Josephsohn is asking himself over and over: how can I push the material to create an extreme human form? We may even think of the sculptures as evidence of the artist thinking with his hands. Josephsohn has no interest in narrative, the difficulty of being human and living in history. Rather, he is enamoured with the plaster and brass. The figures are raw, rough, haptic, reminding us of volcanic rock. The deformed bodies that result say as much about how the artist sees beauty as it does his political or historical world view. 

Josephsohn, born in what was Königsberg, and is now Kaliningrad to a Jewish family, is said to have filled his sculptures with the tumultuous energy of growing up in Nazi Germany. This chaotic agitation and anxiety is literally present in the physical form resulting from manipulated material. Nevertheless, these works are still about the human hiding inside the material and the method of execution. Josephsohn's hands have a presence in their movement around the sculpture.  In the early works, the plinth is as important as human form, and then by the end the figure reaches such levels of abstraction that it becomes the plinth. As a result, Josephsohn's creations become monsters, gentle and warm, but deformed giants, nevertheless. 

Hans Josephsohn, Untitled, 2005