Glimpses of India, currently showing at Bikaner House, is the creation of french artist Michel Testard. Trained at the Ponts et Chaussées Engineering School, Paris, with a subsequent MBA from INSEAD, Michel Testard spent many years in strategy consulting ~ till India crossed his path in 2000, transforming him from a business advisor to a painter ~ “a loving painter of India”!

Finding India powerfully diverse and mysterious, Michel is inspired to put down on paper his observations on this vast, diverse and quirky country.

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Extending his natural talent for drawing, he launched into a 20-year artistic journey, observing and painting India in a variety of themes: cartoons andmetaphors, forts and ruins, people of India, landscapes and streets, Indian music, which he plays on the sitar, smart or mad cities as also thakurs and rajas. Michel looks at the Indian scenario with “childlike appetite and audacity”.

To the people of India, Michel offers impressions, glimpses of Indian subjects froma European perspective, while for Europeans, these are Michel’s insights into he fascination the West exerts on the Indian imagination. Self-taught, Michel has imbibed from a host of western and Indian painters,admitting it openly.

Be that as it may, specific subjects evince specific vocabularies, the drawings and cartoon by far the most delightful and entertaining. He seems to have understood the pulse of India, its ethos and credulity, its myths, realities, absurdities, and above all, its aspirations.

In a certain sense, India, it is said, does not really have a history, since here several centuries co-exist together. Michel seems to love and understand it, often better than do her own countrymen ~ attitude oozing from every pore of his subjects.

That being that, in this show Michel has divided his works into seventhemes ~ Cartoons, Forts and Ruins, People of India, Music, Landscapes, Streets and Interiors, Mad Cities and, Thakurs and Rajas.

With a keen sense of space and locale, he presents the most engaging landscapes peopled with elites and socialites, streets and forts, cities and flyovers, rivers as sites for waste disposal, maharajas and sadhus, with “Globalisation: Earth and Heaven” showing a sadhu merrily speaking authoritatively to Lord Ganesha on his cell phone, Nandi the bull patiently in waiting, even as “the West”, presented as man, pet and, a bottle and glass of wine, tries in vain to size up and figure the scenario.

India is also a land of immense contrasts, one that Michel has taken pains to portray with great poignancy ~ as in the diptych style Art Fair in New Delhi-2018, where the interiors of the mega Art Bazar stands in direct contrast to the street outside, complete with the deafening traffic, congestion and crowds outside. In another similarly formatted work there is the philosopher on his recliner in one half of the painting, a sadhu occupying the other half, immersed in his own kind of philosophy.

As Michel speaks/writes about India his admiration and love for the entire gamut of its existence, its cities, forts and the philosophies of its classical music ~ indeed the teaching patterns of which he finds so different from that of western classical music ~ India’s urban plan and un-plan, the resultant, almost deadly chaos, all touch and concern him. Therefore, his one drawing on an A-4 sheet has now turned into an entire city series with varying characteristics.

Testard draws and paints with a variety of mediums, as yet showing in the very charming small format works, like pages from a notebook, which in a way they are at a mental level, touching so many aspects and socio-cultural aspects of the country, rejecting none, delved into with loving comprehension.

In short, Michel seems to achieve Ananda or Joy, which is the ultimate goal in the Indian philosophy, from all aspects and disciplines (and indiscipline) of the Indian way of life, trying to participate in it, giving some, gaining some, and sympathetically understanding the rest of it. Forthcoming is a long series on the possibilities of Sustainable Development and Art.