When running a project from inside the IDE, the base path is the Working Directory whereas when you run from the executable, that base path is folder that the executable is in.
It 'should' work if it's inside the "project" directory. That is, the one with the vcxproj file (and likely your code files). This may be different, though, depending on the Working Directory setting in the project (Project Properties -> Configuration Properties -> Debugging -> Working Directory). You can change this to a specific folder if you like. If it's the project folder, it will be "$(ProjectDir)".
It might be worth actually testing to make sure that the resource works and loads okay before all of that, though. Simplest way to test it is to provide the full, absolute path and filename. If it works, the file's fine and you just need to set up the paths properly; if it fails, the file itself has problems and it may just be that the exact image format is unsupported (not all of each type will work).