Anany decorated Chauvet 2 with her "Dream Stones"
The artist based in the South Ardèche makes the stone that she transforms into a dream. She is one of three to have the honor of permanently decorating the walls of one of the conference rooms of the Grotte Chauvet 2.
My studio is taking on water and in the end, I like it! Because if I am in Ardèche, it is because the river called me..."
Anany is an artist in all that the word can generate as imagination. Met the day after the floods of October 17 in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche, in the far south of the department, while she was showing her workplace still covered in silt to the firefighters, her art and her speech caught the eye despite the circumstances. To the point of making an appointment with her, a few days later.
She then reopens the same door of a magnificent building located a few meters from the Ardèche River, which has finally returned to its natural bed. It is a former boat garage, built entirely of old stones and with no other opening.
Everywhere, candles light up her works and utensils scattered here and there.
"It's my cave",
comments Anany, not without reference to her art.
An expression that is not just a simple formula because she wants to recreate the lighting conditions of the first men to work on some of her works. On the other hand, when she wants her art to explode, she creates in another workshop bathed in light located on the heights, in Saint-Just d'Ardeche.
The Chauvet trigger
For several years, the one who was born in Belgium, and who crossed the Atlantic to live in New York before falling in love with the south of France, has been working with stone. A material that she reconstitutes, agglomerates, combines with pigments, ochre, charcoal or walnut husk and that she compares to what prehistoric artists did.
"I was among the first to admire the photos of the drawings of the Chauvet cave.
Between the artist Anany and her works, the connection is permanent, as here with her Pierre de rêve commissioned to decorate a conference room in the Chauvet Cave 2.
Photo Le DL/Valentin Lecaille
I fell in admiration and sat down facing the cliffs.
By putting myself in the place of our ancestors, I wondered what to use to convey this natural beauty. The stone came simply because it represents the universe and matter."
Pigments that she makes herself and magnifies thanks to a resin of which she alone knows the secret. "I also enclose paper transformed into stone.
Because before, man engraved his messages in the rock", adds the artist who likes to give movement to his art and evoke opposition, reaction, in the eyes of the one who admires his work.
Charcoal allows in particular to illuminate a work thanks to its reflections produced by a light source. The source of inspiration is simple:
"You have to imagine the cavemen penetrating, torch in hand, into cavities that sparkled on all sides. It must have been magical!"
As a nature lover, she also creates paintings entitled Fleurs des champs, bronze chimeras (cast in Crest), and works with porcelain.
"I stone a concentrate of colors"
From this creative spirit also come Pépites de rêve which are small "interior jewels" presented on a metal rod and which she compares to the wonders she can find at the bottom of the Ar-dèche river. Using the same process, his Dream Stones can be much more massive.
This is the case for those exhibited in one of the conference rooms of the Grotte Chauvet 2 and which are the pride of Anany because few artists can exhibit there permanently.
One is two meters by two, the other one meter by one, and are hung invisibly, to give an impression of floating, as if they could move on the wall. They ended up in this symbolic place thanks to an observant interior designer, on the one hand, and a lot by the alignment of the planets, so much does Anany's presence in this place make sense.
"I will never thank the three discoverers of the cave enough because they made my new life as an artist. The works it contains call into question the history of art! »
Obviously, Anany took fragments of earth located around the cave to create her major works.
"Whoever takes a stone holds in his hand millions of years of concentrated life. I, I stone-re a concentrate of colors in the stone to make it a sparkling treasure." Will it still be visible in 30,000 years? Mystery!
Article published in the Dauphiné Libéré Monday, November 25, 2025 Montelimar Drôme Provençale
•Pierre Brunet JOURNALIST Dauphine libéré
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