Sakti Burman has been living in Paris for more than four decades. Inspired
overwhelmingly as he is by the European genre of painting, particularly botticellian, Sakti’s framework is still his home, his childhood, his native India. An exquisite persistence of memory permeates his work. Images are revealed as if waiting to be found. Just as paint peeling off ancient walls shape stories in your mind, the artist’s images emerge from forgotten tracts telling their own tales. Sakti Burman, a self-confessed dreamer, is content in his fantasy land. Perhaps it his response to the chaos in the world today.

By mid-November the landscape framed by our large French window at 61, Aberdeare Gardens was bathed in autumnal hues. Before our astonished eyes trees turned ochre, rust and brown. Stalks of iris and daffodil sprang up in sidewalks. And the sun performed its vanishing act as the temperatures dropped. It was on a cold and wet November noon in 1959, that we flew out of Heathrow for Paris.