A sequential study of Haloi's works and his evolution as an artist reveals that Ganesh Haloi's paintings are mostly about the compelling world of nature, as much as they are about the autonomy of image-making.

From broad colour fields to minuscule dots and calligraphic lines-the entire range of visual vocabulary in Haloi's works is played out in a way that they function, on the one hand, as pictorial signs and, on the other, as evocative marks. This ambivalence empowers Haloi to explore possible nuances at the experiential and metaphoric levels.

Undoubtedly, quietude and silence overwhelm most of Haloi’s images. Yet, he leaves ample scope for dialogue between the various juxtaposed formal elements within the paintings, between the viewer and the work, and between nature and human consciousness at different registers. Although Haloi’s works are essentially non-narrative, tales of a lost land do emerge, albeit in a whispering tone. His evocative abstractions in semi-opaque and translucent colours encode an elegy of lost landscape, a sort of nostalgic poetry and a mapping of the poignant past— either radiating a bliss or frozen into a pensive mood. Unlike Kandinsky, who deliberately courted obscurity as part of his visual language, Haloi’s art is extraordinarily lucid and coherent. Obscurity and incomprehensibility would be the last thing that Haloi would look forward to. As a matter of fact, clarity and lucidity are the two hallmarks of his art that have drawn viewers increasingly close to his creations, with great admiration and appreciation. The transcendental quality one feels in Haloi’s works is embedded in the very perceptual logic and the pictorial making of his paintings. The viewer is enchanted by the sheer dexterity acquired by the artist over the decades involving meticulous research and practice on the techniques and methods of gouache and paintings. Though his paintings follow a reductionist, non-mimetic and often symbolic idiom, they essentially embody a poetic and lyrical vision—poised between the touched and the felt, between the seen and the sensed.

It is believed that at the core of abstract art is a sense of the true self that is truly human and nourished immensely from the pristine moves of nature. It involves, as Clement Greenberg has written, "pure pre-occupation with the invention and arrangement of forms, spaces, surfaces... to the exclusion of whatever is necessarily implicated in these factors... a tendency towards purity or absolute abstractness". Ganesh Haloi's abstract art, for all its non-representationality, can also be seen as a pretext: a pretext to explore another realm of senses, within.

- Soumik Nandy Majumdar

Ganesh Haloi(b. 1936)

Ganesh Haloi (b.1936) is a Kolkata-based artist, born in Jamalpur, Mymensingh (now in Bangladesh). He moved to Calcutta in 1950 following the Partition of India. The trauma of displacement left its mark on his work as it did on some other painters of his generation. Since then his art has exhibited an innate lyricism and a sense of nostalgia for a lost world. He graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta in 1956. In the following year, he was appointed by the Archaeological Survey of India to create replicas of Ajanta murals. Seven years later, Haloi returned to Calcutta. From 1963 until his retirement, he taught at the Government College of Art and Crafts. He has been a Member of The Society of Contemporary Artists, Calcutta since 1971.

He has participated in several group exhibitions in India, Art Week Tokyo at Okura Museum of Art, Japan; Documenta 14 at Athens & Kassel, Greece/Germany; Architecture of Life, at Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archives at BAM/PFA, Berkeley, California; 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin; A Special Arrow Was Shot in the Neck, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; and over the edge, crossing the line five artists from Bengal at KNMA, Delhi. He is represented by Akar Prakar Kolkata & New Delhi. He has had various solo exhibitions in Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai, Dhaka, and New York including Re-citations: rhymes, about land, water and sky six decades of painting at Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata with KNMA, 2024; Re-citing Land at The Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Mumbai in collaboration with KNMA, Delhi 2022; The Architectonics of Form at Akar Prakar Kolkata and New Delhi in 2022, Form & Play at Asia Week New York in 2020 to name a few.