Michel Testard

MICHEL TESTARD
A wandering painter of cultures

I paint from the perspective of a traveller — not a tourist tagging destinations - an observer seeking authentic encounters with people, everyday life, places present and past. My work is rooted in the crossings between cultures: the colors of India’s rituals and ruins, the silent austerity of Antarctic landscapes, the melancholy grace of forgotten cities, and the comic poetry of everyday life. Travel, for me, is not evasion — it is attention. It demands humility, presence to the other, and the willingness to see beauty and tension in unfamiliar forms.
Whether walking the ghats of Varanasi or wandering through the frozen silence of Patagonia, I try to absorb gestures, textures, and atmospheres. These impressions return in the studio not as literal scenes, but as reconstructed memories — filtered through imagination, emotion, and color. I work quickly, letting intuition guide the brush, my style is spontaneous and expressionist. My paintings try to show glimpses of lived experience — refracted, transposed, reinvented. My originality - if any - lies in blending East and West, reality and fantasy, past and present, reflecting a dedication to seeing the world through a wandering, reflect...

Art Student Ateliers de la Ville de Paris (ABA) 2019-2021
Civil engineer from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées Paris, France
MBA from INSEAD Fontainebleau

- Oct 2017 Private Gallery Neuilly France
- May 2018 Bikaner House New Delhi India
- Dec 2018 Private Gallery Lord Byron Paris France
- March 2020 Gallery Art Indus New Delhi India
- June 2021 Gallery Z&O La Chartre sur le Loir - France
- May 2022 Gallery Montval sur Loir - France
- July 2022 Gallery de la Font, EUS - France
- Dec 2022 Gallery Michael Lonsdale Paris France
- March 2023 Rampuria Haveli, Bikaner India
-July Aug 2023 Gallery Nocogo La Chartre sur le Loir France