Wassily Kandinsky had synaesthesia. He associated colours with specific sounds, such as high trumpet notes with yellow and deeper blue hues with instruments like the cello or the organ. Synaesthesia is experienced by less than 4% of the population. But Ganesh Haloi’s recent works at the exhibition, At the core of the throb, held at Debovasha, evoked sights, sounds, smells and even tactile memories for lay viewers.
At nearly 90, Haloi has managed to keep his canvas fresh and his works appealing without altering his artistic idiom of making dashes, dots, lines, squiggles and shapes dance across the canvas. The basic shapes might remain the same, but their compositions are ever varied and changing. In his paintings, the natural world is reduced to its bare essentials. Yet less is more. The shapes and the lines evoke not just familiar landscapes — a pond overgrown with water hyacinths slightly swaying with the breeze — but also memories. One particular brilliant work, more figurative than the rest, had clouds darkening over the horizon, their shadow quickening over a wide open grassland and two figures running across it with unbidden joy at the arrival of the kalbaisakhi (picture). One can almost smell the petrichor and feel the cool wind beginning to gather before the storm.
“The landscape is in my root,” Haloi had once said. And he returns to it time and again, as Monet did with his water lilies at Giverny, capturing the land of his birth in all its glory with the changing light of the day and the turning of seasons. The lazy flow of the river is captured in thick, almost parallel, strokes with
different shades of blue catching the diverse ways
in which the light reflects
off its surface. Tiny blades of grass, reeds growing along a pond, tendrils of creepers and fish and birds are animated by a rhythm that is not only characteristic of Haloi but also intrinsically familiar to those who have witnessed the landscape
of Bengal.