Painting is commonly divided into two broad genres, 'figurative' and 'abstract', or more precisely 'representational' and 'non-representational'. The distinction points to two basic approaches: one that recreates a world outside itself, and one that builds a self-sustained world of its own. What this division conceals is that what makes a painting a work of art transcends that duality. A painting demands response and contemplation not because of the category it belongs to, but because of the presence it has as a painting. Painterly distinction and merit lie beyond categories, and are found across them.
Ganesh Haloi was born in 1936 and lost his father at the age of nine. Two years later came Partition, which uprooted him from his hometown, Jamalpur in Mymensingh district, and left him drifting between refugee camps on this side of the border for over a year. In 1951, as a first-year student at the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta, his address was platform 12 of Howrah Station. After completing his education, Haloi joined the Archaeological Survey of India as resident artist and documented the cave paintings at Ajanta between 1957 and 1963. He then returned to his alma mater and taught at the Government College of Art and Crafts, Calcutta, from 1963 to 1993, a period in which he slowly arrived at an individual style of his own. His long association with the Ajanta murals influenced him profoundly, and from 1971 his work began to show a comparable lyricism.
The privation of his early life has no direct bearing on his art. Haloi has pursued an artistic idiom that transforms his own perceived spaces of existence into visual spaces on paper. Nature was the mainstay of this perception, formed early in life in his native East Bengal, and linked to his growing awareness of existential space, both fluid and solid, reaching into and away from his subjectivity. Later in life his art added a third dimension to that awareness. His pictorial structures read as abstract as music, because they are built not only on visual impressions of nature but on the imprints nature leaves on his senses. His work has always sought a fusion of the two, with himself as the point where they meet.
He renders the nature space onto white or softly stained paper, giving it structure through tidy, sometimes decorative arrangements of multi-hued colour patches in semi-geometric shapes. None of the images is a literal nature-scape, yet even the most abstract carries a subtext of natural and pictorial forms interlinking. This is because nature's shapes, forms and colours were ingrained in Haloi's sensibility early in life, in the open paddy fields and water bodies of riverine East Bengal. There are no clear boundaries in his work between the spaces of nature and the spaces of life. His mind and sensibility reflect the cultivation and aesthetic of the Bengal School.
Working in gouache, watercolour and occasionally tempera, Haloi's paintings balance atmosphere and incident, opacity and transparency, form and formlessness. His compositions seem to coalesce and come apart at once, as if caught in a moment of flux. His years at Ajanta likely shaped his sense of the integration of support and image: in many works, the support is expressed through an implicit grid, often accented with a stream of diagonal lines. His paintings read like cartographies of remembrance, jagged lines and colour fields textured as if by the sequential moves of migration and of rural land turning urban. For Haloi, the landscape is not a realistic transcription of what is seen but an energetic palimpsest — part land, part map, part manuscript written over with directions and gestures. He turns the landscape into an occasion for contemplating the transient against eternity. Dots, dashes and lines become signs for trees, water and green fields.
Vinayak Pasricha.