Doctor of Physics and Lecturer in the field, Jean-Jacques Salgon is also a writer, who produces autobiographical works, as well as books based on characters who are dear to her (Basquiat, Toussaint Louverture). She lives in Ardèche.
"Moving through the Megaloceros Gallery, we now descend into the End Chamber, which contains the Lion Panel. [...] We find ourselves not in an arena, or on a circus ring, we are in the sky: we see clouds and comets, white walls and supernovas in animal form, all over the wall. The rock itself, subject to quantum fluctuations, seems pale, bumpy, throbbing and light as an ether. Even paler is the Milky Way (the rock seems to have been scratched over around 10 m before it was drawn on), showing these stellar cohorts that we call the lions, bison, rhinoceros, mammoths, or reindeer. The lions open and close the astonishing procession, which reminds me of Courbet's Burial At Ornans. A baby mammoth with fluffy feet, the dark muzzle of an old bison, the back line of a rhinoceros, almost being sucked in by the void of the central cavity. On the other side, the danger has passed, but there is a crush in the herd of rhinoceros, whose stocky, dark stomachs have been made diaphanous and light as a nebula by this celestial mechanics. They seem to be made of this famous black matter that astrophysicists struggle to pinpoint. The profile of one of them is surrounded by a sort of optical echo, like interference fringes augmenting the monumental arch with its horn and the slightly wavy line of its rump. And when a lamp is pointed at the center of this whirlwind, pointing to the eye of the cyclone, everything stops, immobilised, a void opens up, and in an alcove, we see the lonely silhouette of a small Przewalski's horse appearing, with a black mane and cheeks, a white nose and chin, its tail curved to follow the shape of the rock. This modest figure suddenly seems vibrant and resplendent like an apparition".
Translation of an extract from a text published in the Nouvel Observateur, 5 January 2005 and in the book Grotte Chauvet – Impressions (with John Berger, Jean-Marc Elalouf and John Robinson), Ed. de l’Ibie, 2007