Studio Note — After Niaux - Cave art

A day in the Grotte de Niaux.

The cave lies in the northern foothills of the Pyrenees and remains one of the few decorated prehistoric caves still open to the public. To enter is to move back between 23,000 and 14,000 years — to the late Magdalenian period at the end of the last Ice Age.

There is no artificial lighting. You walk by torchlight. The darkness is absolute.

The cave system stretches for more than two kilometres, though only a small section is accessible. In the Salon Noir, charcoal drawings of bison, horses and ibex emerge from the limestone. There are abstract signs, and the only known Paleolithic depiction of a ferret. Over a hundred images survive here. They are spare, assured, structurally exact.

What struck me most was their economy.

Nothing is overworked. Nothing is embellished. A few lines of charcoal hold mass and movement. The artists worked with the rock rather than against it. A fissure becomes the line of a back. A shadow becomes volume. The surface is not passive — it participates.

Standing there, I felt a complex mixture of kinship and distance.

Kinship, because the impulse feels recognisable. The need to reduce form to something essential. The return to the animal as image rather than illustration. The instinct to let surface and mark speak together.

Distance, because the world that produced these images is unimaginably remote — and yet the drawings feel immediate. The line is direct. The hand is present.

I have often described my own practice as a kind of visual archaeology. My horse forms are reduced, repeated, reworked — not as narrative subjects, but as enduring structures that can withstand alteration. In the Primitives series especially, I am interested in what remains after abrasion, scraping, removal.

At Niaux, time is not chronological. It is layered.

The charcoal sits on limestone that has held moisture, mineral, darkness for millennia. The image survives not because it is elaborate, but because it is essential. What remains is structure: line, weight, gesture.

Walking through the cave, I was aware of how little is needed to conjure presence. A curve. A thickened flank. A darkened head. The animal is both there and not there — emerging from the rock, dissolving back into it.

That oscillation feels familiar.

In the studio, I build surfaces only to remove them. Earlier states persist beneath the visible image. The painting carries its own history in its skin. Seeing Niaux did not feel like discovering an origin. It felt like recognising a continuity.

A connection across distance.

An understanding that reduction is not simplification, but concentration.

The darkness of the cave stays with me — not as spectacle, but as context. The animal form held against blackness. The mark made sparingly. The surface as memory.

I left with a quiet sense that some impulses in image-making are less about invention, and more about endurance.

Horse in the deeper galleries partly covered in modern graffiti