Maybe it’s because of the medium — gouache, which, without the strident burnish and body of oil, has this fragile, untreated naturalness. Or maybe, it’s the material — handmade paper. The delicate texture of the surface and the matte paint conspire to conjure a kind of weathered, parched-earth tactility.

Maybe it’s the subdued palette, with beige, brown and amber presiding and burgundy, blue, mustard and a spectrum of greens striking the riveting notes. Or the diagrammatic layout, which appears skeletal, tentative, as though poised for the final touches; waiting to be dressed up, as it were. Actually, it’s a combination of all of the above that lends a kind of wry vulnerability to the works of Ganesh Haloi, which are on display at Akar Prakar till April 14.

Although the artist has done oils and watercolours in the past, these are rare. It is gouache that is Haloi’s medium. Whatever the inspiration — whether architecture or nature — it is his gouache on handmade paper that has the hushed resonance of a single-instrument sonata, reflecting cameos of moods and moments. And the works you get to see at the solo exhibition are gouache on handmade paper. All 16 of them.

There was a time when Haloi’s landscapes were confessional. Retrieved by a lambent memory, they offered fleeting visual references to a land he was torn away from as a boy. Partition had cast him adrift, as it had many others. You could decode in the Romantic’s toast to nature — in the incipient images of say, egrets or banana trees, common to both Bangladesh and West Bengal — an elegiac timbre that dwelled on the loss of his roots.

For a time, he romanced inert stone, starting an affair with architecture, Islamic architecture. The rugged elegance of its geometry extended Haloi’s language in formal terms and imported, through brusque angles and emphatic bands, an edgy self-absorption. Interestingly, both themes acquired a dimen- sion, in their sense of passing time, of impermanence.

The present series reveals inspirational inputs from both sources. Distilled to essentials, you can see nature and architecture meld in intriguing patterns of flat colour segments that boast, in the best of the paintings, of an articulate brevity. Rectangles and triangles; trains of tiny triangles strung like festoons; bands with sudden breaks or bends which are like unbidden pauses or unseen detours; circles and squiggles and lines that litter the surface. These are the elements that put together the diagrammatic layout.

Yet it is not the diagrammatic arrangement, which is so much Haloi’s signature, that one must mention first. Rather, it is his treatment of space. At times, the space is expansive, teasing the eye with inflections of texture and tone, offsetting the focal arena of colour patches. Numbers 3 and 13b could be cited as examples. The dull green background of the latter serves to throw into focus the sedate geometry of the arrangement.

At times, the space is cut up into horizontal and vertical tiers that blink with enigmatic and playful ellipses: scraps of shapes and motifs that seem to stick out from the dividing lines, as though only partly exposed, hinting at more that is hidden, buried. As in No. 11, with its frayed rectangles and scatter of small lines which resemble cracks. Or No.14 (picture), with its five divisions and patterns that look like folded paper. But the suggestion of buried secrets comes through best in No. 2, with its finely graded greens and abrupt little shapes. And, finally, in those works that bring to mind aerial views, the ready suggestion of vertical space emerges.

On occasion, you may feel that the artist is a little too fussy with the neatness of arrangements, even perhaps a wee bit indulgent towards the smart and pretty. No. 15 does appear a little too planned. But then No. 7 seems more spontaneous, with the inadvertent geometry of impromptu stains. And there are, of course, the two best works of the show: numbers 10 and 12.

Both have this dense carpet of greens. A whole range of matted and misted greens, subtly blended. So unobtrusive are these two paintings that you may miss their gentle seduction from afar. The green of No. 12, touched with turquoise and yellow, weaves in the illusion of forest depths. Against the green of the ground in No. 10, the artist just sketches a few nervy yellow lines: an exercise in quiet, capricious simplicity that recalls the Far Eastern tradition.