Desmond Lazaro’s work reinvents miniature painting, the tradition he was trained in. His is a boundary-pushing art that makes this traditional craft seem especially current. Born in Leeds in 1968, Lazaro came to India in 1990 to study at the art school of Baroda. There, he became obsessed with the miniature paintings of Rajasthan and went to train for twelve years in Jaipur under late master painter Bannu Ved Pal Sharma. Lazaro chose to appropriate a craft that is alien to British art education and to deploy it to describe the world around him. Though he has previously worked on documentaries, this is the first time that Lazaro presents a film together with his paintings. ‘The In-Coming Passengers’ opens up new lines of enquiry. This body of work builds, not on the observations of anonymous scenes and quotidian objects, on which Lazaro previously focused, but on the artist’s family history and the reworking of official records and found material.
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Rasna Bhushan is an independent art critic who has written and lectured on prominent contemporary Indian artists and has taught art history at CAVA (Mysore), University of Kent (England), EFLU (The English and Foreign Languages University) and JNAFAU (Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University, Hyderabad) She has curated significant exhibitions such as Telling Tales, 1997 (Bath Festival Trust, England) and Art From India, 1999 (Los Angeles Biennale, USA).
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