Nadine Tarbouriech imagined herself as a little spot on the earth when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. “The idea was fantastic to me,” she says excitedly. “I saw the whole thing on a black and white television at home. I was probably seven years old. One of the images on TV was a picture of the Earth from the moon. If I look back at my childhood, it was the most significant moment in my life and set the tone for what I was to become.” Nadine became an artist.
Born and brought up in the French countryside, Nadine moved to Paris when she was 17 years old. She studied drawing and painting under artists Raffi and André Pédoussault and graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. And for the last 12 years, this artist has been shuttling between Chennai and Paris, living and working out of the Cholamandal Artists’ Village here. She loves the arts, crafts, and prints of the city and it heavily influences her work. She is also an environmentalist at heart, which is why the theme of her latest show, on display at Amethyst, is called Re-cycled.
The show exhibits 19 of her works with recycled paper. “I love paper and I can’t throw it away. When friends visited me and left their paper shopping bags at home, I started painting on them. “I’m very involved with Nature and the idea that we must rethink consumerism. It is a major issue and perhaps we must go back to the recycling methods our ancestors practised.” And so she not just works with paper bags but makes her own paper as well. “The idea of Nature is simple — You need a computer for work but you can’t breathe without a tree.”
She paints Tempera water colours on strips of recycled paper and braids them into interesting and intricate patterns. The colours are bright, vivid and gradient. The weave is not unlike a Chettinad kottan. “My work is influenced by South India and I’m rather fond of the colours of this city. My work is abstract so I work with what I have witnessed, with emotions,” she says. “I interpret the prints, colours and Indian traces that I have discovered through my art.”
The weaves are not just restricted to one colour. Nadine braids yellow, red and orange strips into a bright, colourful square, and this perhaps best showcases the earthen and Indian-ness of her art. Another is blue and green with a smatter of indigo print.
“Through braiding, I want to show stories and how everything in this world is connected and every layer you create is linked to the rest,” Nadine explains. “I’ve spent many years editing films, which means putting together different images to say something. You interlace different layers to create a story.” This motif is a constant in her art. “My past life is present in my work and is very important to me as an artist,” she adds.
Another idea that keeps recurring in Nadine’s paintings is the idea of a trace. “I look for traces on walls everywhere. If you go to Kerala, the whole wall is like art. I find traces of life on the walls or on the pavement, where people have passed by. Children play around the wall and leave their trace on it. This whole idea kept coming back to me,” she says.
True enough, another canvas has her handmade paper filled with colours, and the art resembles a wall with traces of Nadine’s emotions “I like to make my own paper. The paper that was left over after the braiding, I melted into pulp and flattened out. I make my colours using pigments I have collected from my travels around the world — Southern France is famous for its earth pigment and you get pigments made of shells, stones and vegetables,” says Nadine.
The paper has a rustic, handmade texture and imperfect edges. “The texture of this paper I made is what I have been looking for. It is the closest I have found to match the intensity of emotions I portray in my art.”
Re-cycled is on display at Amethyst, Whites Road, Royapettah till December 21.
