After spending time on designs for almost 2,000 corporate brands around the world, Shombit Sen is now focusing on fine arts, which has always been his fascination since his childhood. Sen’s Gesturism art is the creative celebration of the limitless gestures of all living beings, from birth to death. This new style has paintings and désordre installations.The ‘désordre’ installation is a specific innovative piece that ensures his art is not static, but can be rebuilt by the public within his given theme. Sen exhibit his paintings majorly in Paris. Last year he exhibited in Tokyo, Venice, Austria, Kolkata, Paris and Milan. Out of his big displays, Sen has created Leonardo Labyrinth, a large painting with 24 interchangeable canvases as a ‘scrambled installation’ and displayed it at Museo d’Arte e Scienza, Italy. This year he is scheduled to have exhibitions in Mumbai and Barbizon, France.Gesturism is Sen’s artistic revolt against digital virtual art done through software. Overcoming our indispensable slavery to digital technology’s virtual unreality especially in art, Gesturism is irregular deliberate strokes by hand on a physical canvas, paper or any other media signifying impromptu and unprompted, boundless energy in human conduct, dynamic, awash with essential pulsations, shock of the difference, handmade craftsmanship, free of manipulative digital art.Talking about his inspiration behind his paintings Sen says, “From my childhood I was very much fascinated with the art. There was a painter whom I met during my young days and he always used to discourage me to be a painter, even though he was a painter himself. I liked his work and paintings very much. I grew with him and he was the first person who inspired me a lot.”“When I was in the Art college of Kolkata one of my rich colleague took me to the American library. During that time only high society people and rich children were allowed to go to the library. However I managed to visit the library and I found the paintings my father had referred to long time back while telling me the story about how Dutch or German artist came to France. But I could not articulate those paintings at that time. In a glossy book on artist Van Gogh was the dark painting ‘Potato Eaters’ done in Holand. On arrival in France the colours became vibrant in ‘Sunflowers’ with bright colour. This colour is something, which sparks me and inspires me a lot,” he adds. Speaking about the concept of ‘désordre Sen says, “Arrival and merging of migrants since ancient times from Greece, Africa, Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, Europe and more recently 200 years of British colonization in the Indian subcontinent has created a heterogeneous population of extreme diversity over time, often resulting in unpredictable physical disorder in every aspect of life. But India is still the world’s biggest democracy and the values of love, affection and inclusiveness are highly treasured among its multiple cultures. So my concept of ‘désordre’ installations represents my country of origin with its natural propensity to develop different visions of any single reality.”Using Gesturism expressions, Sen has created a new format, the scrambled installation desordre painting. The influence for such a format certainly came from the heterogeneous cultures of India he was born into, with its unpredictable physical disorder encountered in life every day. A desordre installation is done with paintings on canvas, and aligns itself to the forward trends of today’s upside down world across the globe.The unique feature here is that viewer interaction is invited at the exhibition to unscramble a painting that is scrambled and not in order. The painting has one subject, and multiple canvases with white or coloured lines that flow across canvas to canvas. These canvases can be removed from the painting’s frame. They have an easy-to-fix-in-a-slot magnetic system for viewers to physically move them 360 degrees to link the flowing lines.Viewers can thus unscramble a painting in multiple ways to express or recreate multiple and different new ideas. In this way, one painting can be expanded to carry infinite gestures and interpretations of a central theme. As all the canvases are standalone paintings, another way is to arrange all the canvases in scrambled format as individual paintings in a room, in one or multiple walls. Or the viewer can discover the original painting done by Sen by correctly linking the zig-zag lines in them. Art collectors can regularly change the pacement of each canvas to see the same painting in different perspectives.Milan based curator and art critic Alberto Moioli once said that Sen’s colours and gestures contemporize Sardinia’s timeless mysteries. “Sen perceives the landscape not only as a visual artist. Through the senses he reveals a new interpretation of gestures and colours that materialize on the canvas to respresnet the famous Nuraghi, strong and silent sentinels of the Sardinian territory. Today these historic outposts symbolize the past creating a cultural destination that entices international visitors,” he said. Born in 1954, Sen lived in Kolkata. At the age of 19 he moved to Paris. He encountered uncertainty and culture shock in France. Yet to realise his dream of living in the country of artistic freedom, he has since integrated seamlessly into French society, culturally, socially and in the domain of art. Today Sen is a French national whose work activities have made him travel extensively in all five continents. Obviously then his art reflects extreme heterogeneity with oceanic human contact and explosive colours.In 2015, the 6 exhibitions he had were at the Tokyo International Art Fair, International Art Expo in Ca’ Zanardi, Venice, International Fine Art Masters at historic Castle Hubertendorf in Austria, International Art Fair in Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, Fine Arts Academy in Kolkata and the Museum of Arts and Science in Milan, Italy.
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