Well, this is the last time I’m bothering you with my obsession with the cave world… I made it short by trying to put everything. I’m not telling you a story, I just recite my dreams… Her? Don’t look, it’s me, just one of my dreams.
She doesn’t expect anything from this video. She clicks as one opens a window on a landscape already seen a hundred times. The fatigue of the screen is still in her eyes. She works too much, she sleeps little, she piles up images that do not belong to her entirely. “Chauvet Cave – guided tour”. She expects science, archive, dust put in order.
The black comes first. A thick, matricial black, not the black of absence, but that of the front. Then the modern torch appears, thin wound of light in the flesh of the stone. And suddenly, on the screen, a wavy line.
She doesn’t breathe quite anymore. It’s not a horse yet, it’s a promise from behind, a curve torn out of chaos. The comment develops its reassuring sentences: dating, charcoal, superposition. The words glide on its surface without entering. She no longer looks at a document. She feels a presence.
She places her hand on the screen as one would place their palm on a living side. And then she sees it. The movement is not suggested. It is contained. Restrained. Wrapped in stone like a imprisoned heartbeat. The horse is not still: it is stopped. Suspended just before the run. He is still in the pre-race world.
She understands without a sentence, without a notion, without knowing : we didn’t paint to show. We painted to bring people. From that moment, she enters. She doesn’t know when the modern torch disappears. She doesn’t know when her room fades. There is no break, but a silent slip, as when one descends into cold water without daring to look behind oneself.
The air is different. It is humid, heavy, charged with a slow breathing. The cave is there, not as a place, but as a belly. It welcomes. It envelops. It contains. It stands in the shadow as in a matrix of stone.
They are there. Men, women. She does not distinguish them as separate silhouettes: they form a single mass of breath, a tribe united by the need to survive and that, even more obscure, to create. Their gestures are slow, serious, weighed. Each movement costs.
The painter moves forward. He does not draw yet. He listens to the rock. He places his hand, withdraws it, leans back. The stone is not mute. It offers reliefs, shoulders, hips, hollows conducive to birth. Nothing is forced. Everything is negotiated. The mineral world chooses what it will accept to carry alive.
Coal enters the scene. The first stroke is not a line: it’s a breach. Something moves from non-being to being. The painter does not copy a horse. He delivers the one who is already there, locked in stone since the origin of the world.
She witnesses this as we witness an act of generation. The back is forming. The rump stretches. The members seek balance. The body organizes itself in slowness. The animal comes to itself. The painter steps back. He tilts his head. He waits for the image to consent to exist.
Then the eye is traced.
At this precise moment, she feels the gaze crossing her. Not that of man, but that of the beast. An ancient gaze, raw, without symbolism, without metaphor. The horse looks at her from the inside of time. She understands that the exchange is reciprocal: man gives form, the animal gives duration.
Who knows the spirit of man, which ascends to heaven, and that of the beast, which descends to earth?
Around them, others breathe to the rhythm of the drawing. Some murmur. Others hit the stone to make it vibrate. The cave responds with deep rumbles. It participates. It is not decor: it is body.
She feels the immense fatigue of these men. The cold engraved in their bones. Hunger, hunting, death. And yet they descend here, as far away as possible from the light of day, to offer what is useless and yet indispensable: a presence in the world.
She loves them. Not for what they were, but for what they are still. Time begins to spin on itself. The figures overlap. A lion bites an older horse. A rhinoceros arises from an effaced flank. Nothing cancels out. All dialogue. Each generation speaks to the previous one without silencing it. The cave is a living memory where forgetting itself becomes matter.
A child passes. He corrects an almost erased line with a brief, sure gesture, as if it were obvious. No one takes it back. Here, the image is not sacred: it is alive. It extends.
So she understands. It is not a testimony of the past. It is a movement that has never stopped. It is not a message. It is a circulation. The cave becomes fully matrix. Not sanctuary, not museum, but cosmic belly. Each figure is a child rescued from chaos and entrusted with duration. Art is not a language. It is a birth.
She feels her own hands transform. Her graphic designer fingers, her modern woman’s fingers, open in the dark air despite her. She follows invisible lines. She extends the movement. She does not create: she accompanies.
Then the horse jumps. It leaves the wall in an inner crash. It crosses the cave like a revelation. The other animals tremble. The lions move in their stone flanks. The bison shake their mass heavy with eternity. The mineral world begins to breathe.
She knows that these images are not representations. These are passages, open doors in matter towards a world denser than the visible real. That’s why they overlap, correct themselves, repeat themselves: because the passage is never closed.
And suddenly, the modern torch returns. The voice of the commentary too. Learned words, hypotheses, prudences. She is again in her apartment. Her hand is still placed on the screen. The luminous rectangle has become an object again.
She sits down slowly. Her heart beats at a different rate than that of this century. She takes back her graphic tablet. The colors seem dead to him. The too wise shapes. The movement has withdrawn from its usual tools. She understands that something has broken within her: mastery. And that something else has taken its place: listening.
They have eyes, let them look! They have ears, let them listen! They have a spirit, let them use it! They have a mouth, let them shut up!
That evening, she paints differently. She no longer seeks to produce. She waits. The forms come through her. Trembling, imperfect, but charged with a tension she didn’t know. Her figures no longer want to stay flat. They press the surface. They are asking to go out.
She thinks of the cave as a distant and always present mother. A mother of stone, obscure and fertile. She now knows that art does not archive anything. It passes. Before turning off, she returns to the black screen. She can no longer see anything. Yet she knows: the horses still run in the rock. The lions prowl in the shadows. The ancient hands always seek the right line.
She whispers, without knowing to whom:
— I saw you move.
In the silence of the apartment, a vibration responds to him. Not a sound. A tremor. The world is no longer immobile—and perhaps it has never been, since the first glance recognized the first form in the shadow.
Despite their apparent resemblance, they have little in common. Two separate worlds indeed ...
They have been walking since the dawn. Under the tall beeches, the light flows in…
The civilization of the Indus Valley extended its empire to the ancient Sri Lanka.
Discover how your raw perceptions are dressed and distorted to make them presentable
Rama was not born of the flesh of Ama, yet he is his beloved son,…