Ganesh Haloi - Re-citations: rhymes about land, water and sky

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is delighted to be in Kolkataand in collaboration with the Birla Academy of Art and Culture to present the first ever large-scale exhibition of eminent artist Ganesh Haloi in his own city. The selected artworks span six decades of painting. From his early works with imprints of figural images to ever transforming colour fields where nuances of abstraction allude to personal memories and affective experiences that shaped his responses to nature and architecture.

Haloi’s early works captured the various impulses observed in the natural environment - flood, breeze, ploughing of land or  crossing of the river. The mighty Brahmaputra as the lifeline and its various moods, the marshy lands and rich aquatic life all come back to Haloi when he recalls his house in Jamalpur on the river banks. Water used to enter their aangan/courtyard often when the river became forceful. The ‘aangan’ as the first enclosure experienced as a child, both fenced and open, protective and vulnerable at the same time, evolved into leitmotif recurrent in Haloi’s artistic oeuvre. Later on, Haloi’s visual imagination stretched this primordial form of spatial enclosure into an expansive field, with the closed boundary left broken or incomplete, allowing recollections to flood-in. It is the earth and the way the earth moves, its seasons and cycles, its space and time continuum that are ruminations closest to Haloi’s life and his art. His biographical writings abundantly and vividly recount earth as the matter and metaphor for life.

Over the years Haloi’s artistic preoccupations have intensified around re-composing land, his layered pictorial ground receptive to details awakened by memory and imagination. Abstraction in its most subdued iterations unbinds the tangible site and dissolves the definiteness of objects to emphasize the poetics inherent in a fragment, a minute detail, a shadow, a trace or a perceptive moment. His pictorial fields with borders and enclosures open up to swatches of ploughed and sown fields, amorphous water bodies with deeper colours, a filigree of fluorescent fragments and muted imprints.

He neither claimed to be a landscape painter nor a pure abstractionist. In his minimalistic works, one can register an orchestration of formal elements laid out not for simple delectation but for posing new problems as well. His instinctive notational drawings that exude the joy of creative play are like free-verse writings. Just like his persona, Haloi’s paintings neither try to overwhelm the viewer or overstate; instead in their restrained composure, they accommodate the unspoken and the silent gesture. His brilliant gouaches on paper, his fluent Chinese ink drawings on Japanese scroll paper and tempera on board, along with his select works on Ajanta will embellish the exhibition. With more than hundred works on display, this exhibition celebrates Haloi’s irrefutable contribution to Indian art through his unique oeuvre and vision.