Testus | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

Even at the playground, the small Testus was already working to become an artist. Mixing the sand in the sandbox with water, he formed shapes according to his imagination (cakes, animals...). The years passed and the young man embarked on a career of painting in order to represent the mysteries of the universe. He studied pictorial processes from 1985 to 1989, and was introduced to the technique of frescos and drawing the human form, while exploring the great prehistoric masterpieces. After graduation Testus produced murals and worked on heritage restoration from 1998 to 2004 at the Poble Espanyol, an open-air museum situated on the edge of Barcelona. He gradually turned toward abstraction and a more interior art. In 1989, he was introduced to art therapy (a method that uses art as a means of therapy) with Ramon Ballester. He joined the teaching staff in 2001. He now lives in Girona (Spain), where he is involved in art therapy workshops in collaboration with the municipality. He has taught at the city’s School of Art since 2006.\nTestus adapts mural painting techniques for the surface of the canvas. He mixes his acrylic binder with marble powder to thicken the medium. His tests of texture add a tactile value to the flat space of the background, arousing the viewer’s curiosity. The artist creates his own colours in order to control the intensity and brilliance of his paintings. In accordance with the purity of prehistoric art, he chooses mineral pigments and natural colours. Testus draws his models from ancient myths. He is inspired by the principles of art brut (Jean Dubuffet) and by the works by Antoni Tapies (Spanish artist, twentieth-twenty-first centuries).\nCovered with ancestral motifs (idols, fossil footprints...), the background reminds us of old parchment or a Neolithic cave. His paintings combine the simplicity of rock art, the symbolic messages of design and the technical and conceptual freedom of contemporary art. Mysterious and captivating, they offer a dive back into time, to the origins of civilization.\n