Ganesh Haloi: A Show of Recent Works

January 10 - January 25, 2011

For the last three decades if not all his life, Ganesh Haloi has been through an agonizing experience of fashioning and refashioning his art to relate to the visual reality of nature in its complex multi-layered interaction with his self and subjectivity.

He has been always at it in all the earlier phases of his creative engagement, trying to transform naturescapes into mindscapes. But if it were only so he would have taken the high road to abstraction. He chose the less beaten track in not only trying to create images out of his soul soaked in nature but also to give it a form in which art and nature find a new meeting point only to fuse into meta-scapes in his canvases. He wouldn’t paint mere landscapes or the abstractions that his mind’s eye extracts from nature as a visual phenomenon.

 Much of Haloi’s perception of nature shaped quite early in life, closely linked with his growing awareness of all the forms of existential spaces that stretch spiritually and physically, both as fluid and solid reality, into and away from his subjectivity. Later in life his art added a third dimension to that awareness. Art endowed him with the means to trace the contours of those spaces in terms of pictorial structures defined in all the interactive plastic components of a created image. At first sight these pictorial structures strike one as abstract like those of music since they are built not entirely on the visual impressions obtained exclusively from the solid reality of nature but on the fluid imprints they leave on his senses and sensibility. His quest in art has always been to achieve a complete and harmonious fusion of the two with him as the nodal point. 

  Each work sparkles with a mood and moment of the artist in an interior dialogue with nature. Such nimble dialogues are of course mediated by his art in a splendid range of minimal yet richly rallied vocabulary of figurative and non-figurative stock. His language embraces a wide range of experience not always to be rendered in visual vocabulary. Nature’s friezes and fluxes, void and plenty, silence and sounds, stillness and stirrings, ripple and rustlings—nothing is excluded from the totality of his interaction with nature.  

About Ganesh Haloi

Ganesh Haloi was born in 1936 in Jamalpur, Mymensingh (in present-day Bangladesh). He moved to Calcutta in 1950 following the partition. 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 coupled with a sense of nostalgia for a lost world. In 1956, he graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta. In the next year, he was appointed by the Archaeological Survey of India to make copies of Ajanta murals. Seven years later, Haloi returned to Calcutta. From 1963 until his retirement, he taught at the Government College of Art and Craft. He is a Member of The Society of Contemporary Artists, Calcutta since 1971, and lives and works in Calcutta.