La Grotte Chauvet Hors du temps

The moon rises over the Pont d’Arc. It illuminates a path carved out by frost and erosion, overlooking the valley of the Gorges de l’Ardèche, leading to the original entrance to the Chauvet cave.

A voice speaks to us, the voice of the cave. Like a sleeping beauty awakened from a very long sleep, it tells its story in fragments: from its creation by trickling water thousands of years ago, to the entrance of the first animals – notably the bears who found refuge there and whose comings and goings polished the walls of the cave – to the first drawings traced with fingers, charcoal and ochre and its rediscovery. Moving from the starry night to the interior of the cave, the black-and-white, almost cinematographic images bring out the sparkle of the concretions, the freshness of the animal tracks and the splendour of the drawings. Bears, cave lions, mammoths and aurochs come to life before our very eyes.

Rémi Labrusse’s beautiful text is like a song to which Raphaël Dallaporta’s extraordinary images respond, giving us the sensation of entering the cave (inaccessible to the public) with him.With this timeless visit, the authors raise the question of our fascination. What links us to our ancestors of 36,000 years ago? What secrets might the cave still hold for us? Discovered, or rather ‘invented’, just 30 years ago, the Chauvet cave is adorned with drawings that are among the oldest known to date. The variety and sometimes rarity of certain animal representations (felines, bears, etc.) make it one of the greatest jewels of cave art.