When French-born Michel Testard visited India for the second time, in October 2000, he traversed the country and discovered the magic—culture, people, buildings, plains and music. He settled in the country, devoting time to sketching and capturing photographs, and later converting the best ones into paintings.
18 years later, he is set to exhibit these treasured artworks for the first time in an art show 'Glimpses of India', from May 17 to 27 at Bikaner House. With around 60 artworks, he says, this exhibition will give Indians a glimpse of the country that they have missed all this while. With 15 mid-sized and four large canvases on display, you can find the ruins of Rajasthan, ghats of Benaras, the many faces of Odisha, the swamis of Puri, and assorted landscapes on canvas.
However, these are not just canvases, but recreations of pictures clicked by him. The artist has taken several photos of people in his environment—streets and cities, fields and villages, temples, concerts, yatras, beaches, Himalayan hills, riversides and backwaters. “The ruins, for me, depict the border and history of the place. They are the objects that explain the cycle of creation and destruction,” he says.
But ruins are not all that he has in store for the viewers. He has also captured some pictures of swamis on his visit to Jagannath Festival in Puri, and turned those pictures into charcoal drawings. There are re-imagined landscapes, conversations, farmers with wood on their shoulder, sketched stations, cafes, backwaters in Odisha, and local stalls.
“Sometimes, I make live sketches of people in restaurants (e.g. Leopold Café in Bombay or little Buddha in Rishikesh). Sometimes, I make drawings from photos I had taken before. At the beginning, I had classical drawings; I later twisted them into something more abstract. Some of these pieces are on groups of musicians and fusion bands, in cubist style, all drawing inspiration from Indian culture,” he adds.
From small to middle and large formats, there are a range of techniques such as pencil, charcoal, wash, water colour, acrylic, oil and collage that are evident in his works. Even though he claims to be a self-taught painter, his work takes multiple influences from the French cartoonists of his youth (Wolinski, Reiser, Mordillo) to the great names like Braque, Chirico, Giacometti, Dufy and Nicolas de Stael.
