The cave is illuminated by a projected ultraviolet light, endowing the work with a fantastic, futuristic appearance. The richly symbolic hybrid images – combining animals, plants, and ornamental forms – offer a spectacular vision.
Salaud’s works pursue different aspects of metamorphosis, which to his mind is an underlying evolutionary principle that propels and enables the development of new life forms and countless forms intertwined and death is but a transitional stage in the universe’s never-ending cycles of life. The artist’s interest in biochemistry and ethnology finds expression in his work, which is also influenced by primitive cultures, trances and shamanism – particularly practices in which animals are an integral part of rites of passage. His work may be read in relation to Ernst Cassirer’s definition of man as animal symbolicum. According to Cassirer, man – contrary to animals, which perceive the world instinctively, through their senses – makes sense of the world through symbolic forms. He describes man as entrapped in a network of symbols and meanings of his own making. The upward-turned gaze in Salaud’s cave encounters a universe of entities which hover in the dark, in a twilight zone between dream and reality, touching on the dark, enigmatic, mystical aspects of reality.

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