Tantra meets Biblical icons

Anoothi Vishal is struck by Christian Puard, one of few existing egg tempera artists dabbling in a pre-Renaissance technique.

One look at French artist Christian Puard's brightly coloured, highly-stylised works and you are reminded of a kedegree. No, not kichdi, plain dal and rice, but a mishmash of many other influences, butter, mackerel. sausage... Similarly, here there's Orthodox iconography but also tantra, ideas of the sacred feminine, S H Raza and well, even Da Vinci Code, or that's what strikes me at the very first glance!

Sitting outside the Experimental Art Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, Puard can't hide his delight at the fact that all these inflences in his works have succeeded in "pulling us all the way" here.

But the images, along with all their many associations, have only struck us later. We are here, first and foremost, intrigued by a process of painting that can be traced back to Byzantine times but one that hasn't had too many followers (or buyers) ever since the Renaissance!

Puard is one of the few contemporary exponents of the egg tempera, a process of painting that uses egg yolk to bind pigments instead of using a medium such as oil. A tempera artist must manufacture the paints himself by the simple process of mixing finely-ground pigment, water and diluted egg yolk.

It's an old technique but one that allows for layering (up to 40 layers, Puard tells me) and is thus able to convey depth in a way that modern techniques don't allow besides which, the colours, it is said, remain steadfast. For eternity? We don't know. But perhaps you should look at the works of Botticelli, the Florentine painter of early Renaissance, the last-known dabbler in tempera "" "from those times", as Puard tells me, because, of course, there are those like him of these times.

Puard picked up the technique from a Russian icon painter who survived World War II and made his way to France through Switzerland. (The Orthodox or the Eastern church employed many tempera painters who later started doing more secular, commercial works as well.)

The Russian artist belonged to a family of icon painters going back to the 16th century but once he had imparted the technique to Puard, stranger, non-European icons began to be incorporated in this old legacy.

In 1986, Puard made his way to Kalakshetra, Chennai, drawn by the rhythms of Bharatnatyam and the talas of Carnatic music. He soon realised that he "would need another life" to learn how to sing.

But that didn't stop him from incorporating the "nuances of the rhythms" into his art. Whether they reference Biblical parables and symbols or tantric ones as in the mother goddess et al or even Buddhist art, all of Puard's works are fairly geometrical "" at one point he traces out a perfect but invisible pentagon in the body lines of a female figure; "optical tricks to guide the viewer's eye" "" and he says rhythm helps him organise these patterns.

"The taal is the skeleton while the raag is the colours," he says of his works. Of course, he is also careful to break the symmetry.

There are a lot of bindus and lotuses in his works as well as the five elements, and we question this "exotic India" association. But Puard says medieval art all over has commonalties. His, of course, is the contemporary medieval.