Visual aesthetics is founded on the organization of space so as to convey an experience of beauty. Space comes with many expected organizations, which may be utilitarian, symmetric, perspectival, hierarchic, each with its sense of aesthetics.

These mundane forms of organization, with  their explicit rationales and literal aesthetics, are “given” to us by the world. When we  refuse these conventions, a strange land looms, whose organization arises from the play of objective and subjective singularities. To use the language of Abanindranath Tagore, this play can be called antar-bahir jog. It is the domain of abstraction, where the principles of visual organization, such as form, colour, texture, rhythm, and quality of life-vibrations, are released to become elements and categories of spatial organization forming a subjective language for the objective constituents of world-making.

In these paintings of formal exploration, Haloi often lays out his tools: stippled rectangles or triangles, horizontal, vertical or oblique, laid alongside their inverse, obverse or reverse ideas like matter-spirit couples; a vocabulary of strokes, a gradation of shades, lines with arrowhead or other ends. Natural flowers transpose to stylized relatives from the world of regional arts. Leaves turn emblematic or their presence in the wild is kindled in unlikely urban objects, such as books or manicured forms of interior design. Absence returns in presence and vice versa, often in juxtaposed doubles, territorializing unidentified or fragmented landscapes with flashes of beloved familiarity, or abstracting lines, curves, rhythms, movements, textures from nature. With nature and culture, the materiality of artistic execution is an equal partner in the world of these paintings: brushstrokes that invite related brushstrokes for the rhythmic play of anonymity or random smudges that are made to emulate natural objects and further slowed down for the visual analysis of their abstract properties.

These twenty paintings constitute a welcome to the magic work of Ganesh Haloi, at once the fragrance of regional culture and sensitive riverine landscapes of Bengal, and conceptual abstraction that co-exists like a generative grammar with nature: a language of sense and a language of sensation.

Debashish Banerji