Languages of symbolism

Ganesh Haloi's gouaches and watercolours, on show in Mumbai recently, reflect a significant shift in direction.The artist leaves the flatness of topography and constructs new forms. Each bears witness to the revelry of the natural world, with its dialogue between the brilliance of a sunburst set against the vibrancy of a rainbow. RANJIT HOSKOTE writes.

GANESH HALOI belongs to that distinguished lineage of Indian abstractionist painters who phrase their non-representational explorations as stylised departures from the landscape. Haloi's confreres in this lineage include such luminaries as Ram Kumar, Laxman Shreshtha, Rajendra Dhawan and Akbar Padamsee in his "Metascapes" phase - these painters are united in their treatment of the landscape as a pretext to bear contemplative witness to the cosmic cycles of growth, decay and regeneration. It is not the visible terrain that we view in their works, but an interplay between materiality and time, the forces of construction and the forces of dissolution, the forms of transience and the outlines of eternity.

In Haloi's paintings, especially, these elements are crafted into eloquent symbols of the ceaseless human struggle to map the territory of chaos. Haloi's recent gouaches and watercolours, which were exhibited at Gallery Lakeeren in suburban Mumbai this month, represent a small-scale reprise of his larger oeuvre. Miniature though the paintings were in scale, the exhibition registered a significant shift of direction on Haloi's part.

Throughout the 1990s, Haloi's gouaches had seemed to fall naturally into the rhythms of topography: sectors and mudflats were worked out in spans across the picture surface; intermittent roads started out in patches that resembled fields, negotiated rocky terrain, only to peter out. "This is the land I cultivate," said the artist to this writer in the summer of 1993, during his last exhibition in Bombay. He endorsed the metaphor with expressive hands that blocked the air in quadrilaterals. Reaching instinctively for a sheet of paper, on that occasion, he had sketched out a rapid vocabulary of linear forms for me - plotted across his frames in muted colours, they offered 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.

Austerely abstracted though they have been, Haloi's paintings retain specific connections with the realms of emotional experience that he has traversed. "Everything begins in pain," he said to this writer in the course of a conversation. When we turned to his paintings on that occasion, every element - from the snake-like road and the dried river-course to the vestigial thatch hut and the torched boundary of a town - attested to the harsh truth of that epigrammatic utterance. Every line is skewed, every array of components strained as though by the forces of nature. It is as though flood and drought had wreaked their havoc, leaving the desolation of ruins in their wake.

Haloi's preoccupation with the twin themes of devastation and resilience is intimately linked to his personal 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 with the Brahmaputra, in the delta region of which he grew up. The painful recollections of the communitarian holocaust that attended the Partition were to be painted over these childhood experiences, but the later trauma could not wholly obscure or obliterate the earlier sense of idyll.

As in an aerial view, Haloi's paintings allow for the simultaneous viewing of several interlocking strata. In his tightly demarcated zones, silence is contrasted with articulation, stasis with movement, consolidation with upheaval. Haloi's art has evolved through a series of transitions, from the pure landscape to the present abstractionist version of the landscape. The eye is attracted to the stray detail in his works: a red pug-mark, a deeply marked square, an arrow-head. If a nostalgia communicates itself through the deserted houses and the brooding thickets, there is also a stoic acceptance of transformation.

This is, perhaps, the attitude of the refugee reconciled to the savagery of time; the awareness of victimhood appears to have been tempered, for him, by contact with a philosophy of tranquillity that provides a counterpoint to the disquietudes of contemporary life. It is probable that this philosophy of tranquillity first revealed itself to Haloi through the bejewelled images of Ajanta during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he worked in the Buddhist cave-sanctuary as an artist making pictorial records for the Archaeological Survey of India.

The Ajanta murals best incarnate, after all, that interplay of transience and eternity which fascinates Haloi - in these portrayals of episodes from Buddhist sacred narrative, the figures are serene in their seeming indifference to the passage of time; and yet, as material creations, they are subject to changes of temperature and humidity, to the corrosive logic of the sun-dial and the water-clock. It is to Haloi's Ajanta period, also, that we may trace the archaeological metaphors which define his art: it is no accident that his pictorial project dwells on patient digging and exposition, the lyric and melancholy examination of the tissues of history.

But Haloi's recent paintings are quite differently conceived and structured. The artist leaves the flatness of topography behind, and constructs a far more three-dimensional dream reality than he has so far attempted. Haloi's new forms evince a lightness and playfulness that they did not formerly exhibit: they bear witness to the revelry of the natural world, with its dialogue between lightness and radiance, the percussive brilliance of a sunburst set against the vibrancy of a rainbow.

The landscape, though not evoked in the physical detail of its contours, is articulated in its lush brownness and greenness; the depth and mystery of the forest are invoked. The textures and colours convey the broad sense of fields, mountains, wastelands and riverine tracts in these paintings; on the other hand, the emblematic keys and templates serve to graph hills, river courses and areas under cultivation across these sensed presences.

It is apparent that these paintings derive their distinctive energy from a dialectic between two related but opposite imperatives: the mapmaker's impulse towards ordering the chaotic sensations provoked by the environment on the one hand, and the traveller's sensuous delight in the terrain through which he is passing, on the other. In formal terms, therefore, Haloi now steers us towards a dialogue between the realm of nature and the realm of artifice - that is to say, between the object and the sign.

It is surely significant, in this context, that Haloi's current paintings should replay the distant resonances emanating from the first phase of European abstractionist art: in his current forms, we find refracted the idioms associated with the mystical Kandinsky, the revolutionary Malevich and the Orphist Delaunay. By affirming this particular ancestry, Haloi dramatises a vigorous and even pagan celebration of self-extension.

We would not be mistaken if we were to surmise that his recent paintings commemorate the effulgent moment when the human consciousness opens up to the environment, so renewing both itself and the languages of symbolism through which it expresses its anguish and exhilaration.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Next     : Fresh old tale