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.

-Soumik Nandy Majumdar

‘I can sense, feel and even see everything out there and in my works. Not only the tangible physical world and its nurturing forces but I can also see the elusive atmospheric elements—the ethereal ones like the wind, air, light, darkness, sound, resonance, silence, movement, vibration, rhythm everything. You can find all these elements in my works.”

-Ganesh Haloi

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, 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; and Figure-ing Out: The Ajanta Project and Now at Akar Prakar, New Delhi in 2025 to name a few.

The artist lives & works in Kolkata.