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Of a Pristine Introspection

Oindrilla Maity visits the veteran artist Ganesh Haloi at his studio during his solo show in the Sanskriti Art Gallery, Kolkata and comes out with a vivid picture of his life and times. She finds out the cathartic effects of his ruminating works.

Ganesh Haloi

Light is broken/Unity is shattered/Limit disappears in limitless
Solid flows as stream/Liquid turns out to a solid state
Look at me/I am nowhere
- Ganesh Haloi

"Do you now know why I had written it?" Asked Ganesh Haloi, as he explained what each line of the poem signifies - in the very act of his acute observation of nature.

The artist belongs to that genre of painters who had witnessed the   country splitting up into fragments; emergence of two new nations; India achieving her freedom and the years thereafter – the agony of separation and settling down on a new land which is now alienated from that of their own – Bangladesh. They have left behind their homes, land and possessions, and cannot ever go back to the same place where they were born, and where grew up playing under the shades of the banyan trees, rested their eyes in the cool breeze, lying down by the streams that went along meandering trails around the hamlets. The agony of such a separation has never ever spared them. Haloi's infatuation with nature, quite obviously marks its point of departure from this point.

Born in 1936 in Mymensingh in Bangladesh, Ganesh Haloi had migrated to India with his family in 1950 and finally settled down in the country. He got himself admitted to the colonial art institution – the Government College of Art and Crafts from where he had graduated and joined the Archaeological Survey of India to work in a project on Ajanta.

"They often say that the reds, ochre and browns are influences of Ajanta, but it is quite funny to accept such lazy generalizations. You can never deduce an absolute source."

Ganesh Haloi's works (more often than not gouache on Nepalese rice paper) are reflections of his participation with nature. He stands before the sublime and experiences it. His perception permeates his senses – the consequence of which takes life on paper. Haloi's observation does not only record the minutest details, but also contemplates the logic behind it, after his own fashion. "Light is broken, he continues, "I say 'broken' because you cannot find the same light everywhere. It differs - becomes deep, or fades out as it falls on different surfaces. Its unity shatters because it is not an uninterrupted chain. It breaks into millions of pieces."

Haloi's abstraction follows the basic three fold step – the same principle that leads to abstraction: a) truth to nature, b) stylized similarity to the original, c) beyond recognition. In fact, the whole of his career can be categorized into three successive genres, corresponding to the three steps. His earliest works were truthful depictions, retaining prominently the contours of the objects in nature. 'Subarnarekha'' the 1970 series in which the contours appeared to be more definite than abstract is an obvious example. The 'Metascape' series, as the name suggests, was a journey from the earthly to the metaphysical – more spiritual than being material. In 1992, the lyricism of nature was replaced more by the angularity of the architectural shapes, while in 1993 he gave in to complete abstraction – introspecting the deeper truth in nature.
The horizontal formats of the artist’s work are quite obvious references to the Chinese scrolls of the Sung Dynasty. However, Haloi differs fundamentally from the Chinese school in being more playful and often his works are more angular, nearly cryptic in form – in stark contrast with the soft lyricism of the latter. Haloi is more geometric than rhythmical. His geometry often turns out to be nearly scribbling, nature is reduced to being nearly indiscernible. He leaves out the extreme upper and lower margins of the pictorial plane and works on an intermediate space between the two – as though he neither belongs to the upper reaches of the heaven, nor beneath the ground underneath his feet. He belongs to the earthly, the mundane – to the human world – cherishing an existential bent of mind.

His latest on-going show at the gallery Sanskriti bearing  the title ‘Unwanted’ seems curious enough. Haloi explains – our demands often remain unfulfilled. There is almost always a void between all that we want and finally end up with. ‘Unwanted’ is only an interaction with that void. An endless war with the contradictions within one’s own self. Hypothetical, he might sound, although, Haloi remains the unchallenged master of a nearly an era which perhaps won’t last with us long.

A contemplative mood dominates his works. Haloi, despite being an immigrant, never does his work feature an agony vociferously. Never does he become a protestor who wants to evade a forced situation. His are a tranquil acceptance; imbibing the darkness through an intercourse with nature. It is like giving everything away to the vast expanse and pristine serenity and therefore the lines: "Look at me/ I am nowhere". The intractable nature perhaps sponges out of him all human sufferings. Its all-pervasive energy, as Turner had witnessed it, has a cathartic effect upon the human soul. So feels Haloi, too.