That Ganesh Haloi, like many artists before him, redefines the compass of abstract art as nature is clearly reflected in his compositions — the bountiful delta of riparian Bengal, to be precise. It is easy to discover the essence of green paddy fields, the swollen rivers, rivulets and swift streams that irrigate its rich alluvial soil, the mirror-like ponds, dark clouds showering spears of rain, the greenery and the blossoms in his geometric forms and lines that are endowed with a life of their own.
It is true that one can easily find the pervasive influence of the great Modernists Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee on Haloi’s paintings, but his work is steeped in the ethos of Bengal and it is unimaginable without the cadence of full-throated Bhatiali songs sung by boatmen, the indigenous folk art, of which the octogenarian artist has a vast museum-quality collection, and indeed its landscape brooding over his works like a great bird.
Quicksilver imagination
These simple elements, more than any high philosophical thought, go into the making of Haloi’s art. However, it is true that one may be tempted to look for sublime meanings in his work because they create an impression of immense tranquillity that cannot be easily shattered. His exhibition in Kolkata that starts tomorrow is curated by young Jesal Thacker, who has qualified from Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art in Mumbai and has written and published extensively on Indian artists about whom not much material is easily available.
In this exhibition, the artist, whose works were recently exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, at the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and at Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, is showing mostly recent works done last year — some large paintings and smaller work in black and white using watercolour and pen and ink.
In every fresh exhibition, Haloi reveals a new aspect of his psyche that was not presented earlier in so significant a manner.
With a quicksilver imagination, this is not a difficult task for the artist, for his work is an extension of his psyche. Lines, infinitely variable and of different width, and rectangles and triangles arranged in harmony with the rest of the composition are fundamental to all his work.
This time, Haloi is childlike in his simplicity, his effervescent spirit bobbing in the blue like a kite playing with the breeze. A colourful folk toy bird, a whirring paper windmill, or chorki as it is called in Bengali, a garland of mango leaves hung during festivities, fluttering pennants, various letters of a fantastic alphabet bearing a distinct relation to Bengali, tiny luminous green leaves shooting out of nooks and crannies are painted in bright shades on a light brown background on paper with gouache.
Contrasting arrangements
Age has given him the licence to abandon his earlier concerns about juxtaposing forms in disparate sizes and shapes, although that interest returns in his smaller black-and white watercolours with planes in sharply contrasting arrangements.
It’s as if we are viewing the world and nature through a multi-faceted prism. This is the only suggestion of disharmony in works that avoid any hint at the violence that threatens to atomise the world any moment.
Yet, Haloi has experienced violence first-hand, when his family in Mymensingh district of what is now Bangladesh was forced to leave home and move to Kolkata, which provided shelter to thousands of refugees during Partition.
He trained at Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata, and then joined the Archaeological Survey of India when he was posted at the Ajanta caves.
It was during this period that he had made his exquisite copies of the frescoes. He established himself as an artist after years of struggle, like many of his contemporaries from across the border. Yet Haloi eschews any signs of trauma and opts for lyricism and philosophical calm, observing the human situation from a distance. So, while Jibanananda Das’s verses with their poetic descriptions of the fertile land of Bengal is relevant to Haloi’s work, the paintings avoid the darker shades in Jibanananda’s poetry where death lurks beneath the surface quiet.
In free form
Human presence is absent from Haloi’s paintings, except for stray exceptions. But their very absence is indicative of their presence, for what we see is the handiwork of human beings.
In a particular painting, a bicycle stands amid an evocation of the architectural beauty of the ghats of Varanasi and the flights of steps leading down to the waters of the Ganga. Although the steps are rendered with mathematical precision, there is nothing cold or austere about Haloi’s paintings. In Haloi’s hands geometry takes on the rhythm and grace of Indian classical music where numbers are often the source of their measured tones.
Ganesh Haloi has devised a coded language of his own in which squiggles, curves, blossoms and a line of minuscule “dashes” that allude to the running stitches of the kantha — the handmade quilts that Bengali women would once make and embroider using old saris — allow him the freedom to be fancy-free in his small pen-and-ink drawings.
With minimum effort, and giving in to his impulse to improvise, Haloi comes up with a handful of “miniatures” that fascinate viewers by the sheer brilliance of his capricious innovation. Free in form and lively, these are like fast musical compositions of a virtuosic nature whose lightness and simplicity are astounding.
ON SHOW: Ganesh Haloi: Poetics of Abstraction , January 15-February 24 at Akar Prakar, Kolkata
The writer is particularly fond of Old Buildings. His latest book is Calcutta 1940-1970: In the Photographs of Jayant Patel .
