Origen

Since the dawn of time, we have wanted to represent the world in which we live. To recognize and understand it, so we could better explain ourselves. At first, we must have used isolated sounds, babbling accompanying some improvised dance. Then images: lions and deer, wolves and reindeer, bulls and bears emerging from the depths of the earth, with some rudimentary tools. And finally language, words weaving stories, poems, myths transmitted by word of mouth for millennia until gradually losing their voice and fading completely.

The paintings that amaze us so much—the multicolored horses of Lascaux, the fiery-eyed felines of Chauvet, the sinuous bison of Altamira, the hands of Sulawesi, the vulvas of Tito Bustillo, the chimerical creatures of El Castillo—are just a fraction of what once existed. And what existed remains a mystery.

The world, however, was a different place, dominated by large mammals: the powerful rhinoceroses, the swift horses, the gigantic mammoths asserted their power over humans, who were a minority. Behind every new horizon lurked a threat: a predator, a frost, a prolonged famine. Life expectancy did not exceed 30 years. They knew no agriculture. Nor metallurgy. But they did know music and jewelry. They knew how to make fire. To count. To kill from a distance. To create tools and to speak. Stone was sacred, possessing mystical powers: there was no nobler material to house a dead person. And in the depths of the rock, in its unsettling hollows, they captured the first works of art.

What compelled them to do it? Can we call those cave paintings art? Are they the origin of our art? And what do they mean? Were they a way of expressing their beliefs? Of connecting with the Afterlife? Of filling a void? Of encouraging hunting? And why are they all so similar, with hardly any variations except in the details of the legs or ears of the bovines? And why are they in almost inaccessible places? Why couldn't they be seen?

From Africa to the Near East, from Indonesia to Europe, successive images, superimposed, unfinished, interacting with each other thousands of miles away, continued for twenty millennia until the planet changed. Until the glaciers receded, the reindeer herds dwindled, and humans increased their power. Then, cave culture came to an end. And so did the culture of ocher engravings, and shell necklaces, and griffon vulture flutes, and ostrich eggshells.

Their works ceased, yes, but not their symbols. The immaterial power of their images. Because if today we swim in a universe of signs, be they traffic signs or iPhone icons, it is thanks to those first creators, capable of awakening genuine emotions with the purest strokes.

And those same emotions are what we now experience as we return to the caves to design this new collection. As we hear the sound of our breath as we delve into their depths and light a torch in the darkness to bring forth a world that no longer exists, with its wild horses, with its gigantic mammoths, and listen, to the rhythm of distant music, to the voice of a storyteller narrating an ancient tale.