Awe-inspiring and mystic, French artist Julien Salaud’s constellation-like thread art evokes teeming scenes of nature, mythologies, and prehistoric cave paintings. And lasers.

Polygonal representations of birds of prey in flight, freshwater fish, deer, a human draped in the regalia of a forest god, bears, and felines arc over the walls and ceilings with arresting abandon.

The artist’s spider web–like world of constellations glows with threads coated in UV paint visible only under UV light. The threads are knotted around nails embedded in precise positions on the walls and ceilings of the gallery.

Salaud is a trained biochemist who spent 10 years gathering data on the impact of human activity on wildlife in the French Guyana.

When he defected to the art world after cottoning on that he and science were not “compatible,” wildlife continued to be the muse of his etchings, drawings and sculptures, which are loosely architected around Ernst Cassier’s definition of of man as animal symbolicum, describing man as entrapped by symbols and meanings of his own creation.

Salaud’s twilight zone between dreams and reality, observable only in darkness, was produced during an art class held by the artist at Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art with Israeli art school graduates and selected artists from the Museum’s educational staff.