When Adam Szymczyk, the director of Kunsthalle Basel and artistic director of Documenta 14 in 2017 in Kassel, visited Kolkata in 2014 for the historic Curator's Hub at Experimenter, he was deeply impressed with an exhibition of Ganesh Haloi at Akar Prakar Gallery. It gave him ideas for a future date; Szymczyk was clear about his ideations for art, as a director at the helm-Docmumenta 14 would be "valid for today" and reflect the zeitgeist. It would be a "tool for understanding the present — the contemporary", which he describes as "the moment of transgression".
While Szymczyk had the humility to admit that he was "learning and trying to build a picture", his interest in Ganesh Haloi's works in the maze like magnificence of Akar Prakar in Kolkata became an epic experience because he acted on his insight and inner responses.
And Ganesh Haloi is an ace of a discovery because he is one of the finest chieftains of the abstract world, humility personified, just creates within the womb of his own silence. Over the years Haloi has often spoken of his favourite authors Tagore, Bibhutibhushan, Manik Bandyopadhyay, and his admiration for Abanindranath's Bageshwari lectures on art as well. While classifying Haloi's works as "abstraction", is somewhat tame, his works are an amalgam of experiences that have been distilled in the prism of time. Adam Szymczyk had described the contemporary as "a moment of transgression", and this non-conformist element he had perhaps discovered in Haloi, the first Indian artist who had no allegiance to Baroda, but Bengal to be chosen for Documenta.
Haloi's paintings are akin to Bengali poetry and the evocation of the vignettes of fertile green paddy fields, and rivulets and ponds in the land of Bengal. When I met him at his home in Kolkata in 2006, he spoke of his love for Western classical music. Haloi reveals a gentle colonial classicism in his love for Western classical music and sonatas and symphonies.
His works sometimes in tempera and sometimes in gouache are lyrical echoes with a rare quiescence. Haloi scatters his elements as sparse, eloquent symbols on his verdant fertile terrain-he has often said that they are symbols of ceaseless human struggle mapped in the territory of chaos. Haloi's gouaches and watercolours, represent a small-scale reprise of his larger oeuvre. Not quite large in scale, they invite the viewer into his ideation of the rhythms of topography: he spans the pictorial surface with sectors and mudflats and intermittent roads that resemble fields, negotiated rocky terrain, only to give us a fleeting glimpse that doesn't want to tie down time. "A work of art is like a land I cultivate, it grows progressively but very quietly," said the artist to this writer in the summer, during his last exhibition in Delhi at Gallery Espace 2006.
Haloi endorses his metaphors with expressive hands that echo arching slender fingers. He has the ability to sketch out a rapid vocabulary of linear forms - plotting across his frames in muted colours, they offer testimony to an epic history of loss and suffering, the sombre gravity of the browns and reds relieved only occasionally by hints of luminous green. Austerity and authority range through these works that hide realms of emotive experiences. Abstraction in grammar for Haloi is about the amalgam of the past and the present, the road that curves in serpentine splendor can later become the rivulet that bore arid resemblances to a story.
Every line in these works is skewed, every component distilled through the prism of time by the forces of nature. If floods and droughts wreck their havoc, ensuing in the desolation of ruins in their wake Haloi freezes those desolate dictums of transcience.
Haloi's preoccupation with the twin themes of devastation and resilience is intimately linked to his past. Born in 1936, in a district that is now part of Bangladesh, he was 11 years old when the Partition of the subcontinent divided his home province, and a cyclone of hatred and violence turned him into an exile. Haloi's earliest memories are of the Brahmaputra delta-the region in which he grew up. The painful recollections of the communitarian holocaust that attended the Partition were imprinted on his childhood experiences, and the aftermath of trauma could not wholly obscure or obliterate the earlier sense of idyll. "Art," he says, "quivers between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, and the present and absent."
Over the years, Haloi's art has evolved through a series of transitions, from pure landscapes to abstractionist aberrations in the details of a landscape that has formed in the mind's eye. Haloi's vision is symbolic but also filled with nostalgia; he indicates human presence through elements such as the suggestion of tiny temples, or the stubble of desolate paddy fields and boats with a robust red tint thrown in somewhere.
This is why he once told a critic: "The firmness of geometry is inherent in my thinking process. It is as strong as life itself. It is never limp. In my paintings one can observe the struggle to try and know oneself. You never know where you will end up. But you are electrified - the kind of exhilaration one feels on viewing a lofty mountain." At Documenta 14 lovers of the world of infinite realms in abstraction will gather and contemplate on the finesse and prismatic notations of a gentle genius called Ganesh Haloi.