Since Neolithic times the evolution of a succession of landscapes in nature has been shaped by agriculture. And since Roman times, nature has been hemmed in by the urbanization of space through road networks.

Now that the development of lines of communication has enclosed nature in urban space, caves appear to be the last wild frontier.

In Paleolithic times, explorers structured caves by painting colored signs. They invented figurative and abstract images that exhibit the cultural evolution of reality. They were the first to organize natural space artistically by creating an architecture of signs and colours to provide an archetype of the imaginary with which to turn caves into cultural space.

Jean Truel, painter, speleologist, and creator of the Bramabiau Cave rock paintings, presented works in caves in 1992 at UNESCO. In the Grotte de la Deveze, the massive rocks of the Chaos are part of a pictorial work of art. In it, Truel presents wild nature in its brute materiality with his representations.

Truel's evocation of the underground river symbolizes simultaneously the origins of the cave, primeval art, and a wild space that exists only in his representations. By transforming fragmentary visual memories of cave passages he has traversed into pictorial representations of a chaos of collapsed rocks, Truel evokes the sedimentation of ancient through modem cultures.

In the French Museum of Speleology, one of Truel's paintings commemorates the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Grotte de la Deveze by exhibiting a synthesis of the différent routes the artist has traveled inside the cave.

In this cave itinerary, Truel's representation of the cave by random markers becomes a receptacle in which the various routes converge toward a mythical center where the painter's imagination anticipates reality.