Even at 89 years of age and armed with just a handful of geometric symbols that have become his signature for a while now, Ganesh Haloi continues to charm and awe with his landscapes. An exhibition of his recent works at Akar Prakar, Ganesh Haloi: Senses Within, was no different. The minutiae of Bengal’s verdant countryside — certainly from his memory of Jamalpur in Bangladesh but equally representative of West Bengal’s farmlands — animated the large-scale works in various shades of green.
The use of techniques like granulation — not dispersing paint particles evenly so that they clump together in places and achieve a speckled texture — and wet-on-dry paint layered on to wet-in-wet paint adds depth to the flatness of the gouache works. Squiggles, lines, semi-circles, half-triangles and other shapes mimic natural elements like mountains and trees. The end result is compositions that sit somewhere between the fluidity of abstract symbolism and the naturalistic depiction of light and colour achieved by Impressionism.
In Untitled 1, for instance, the green on the field is darkening, as if under the shadow of an oncoming cloud, and flocculated with black and brown as if turning muddy with the rain; lines that look like the bare branches of a tree are bent under the force of the storms, giving the minimalist piece a wonderful sense of liveliness. Untitled 6 evokes a river — is it the one that flowed beside his childhood home? — its banks buzzing with activity, perhaps owing to the many temples that dot the floodplain. Untitled 10
stood out — it is not just a smattering of shapes and lines; instead, one can sense silhouettes of densely-packed, higgledy-piggledy buildings, against a dimming sky (picture).
Haloi’s landscapes are reticent monologues around memory and space, poised between the melody of natural rhythms and their stillness.