SENSE AND SENSATION GANESH HALOI - 2021
First published in India in 2021 by Akar Prakar in association with Mapin Publishing in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Sense & Sensation: Paintings in Ink & Brush by Ganesh Haloi’ at Akar Prakar, Kolkata, from 20th March to 19th June, 2021. International Distribution North America ACC Art Books T: +1 800 252 5231 • F: +1 212 989 3205 E: ussales@accartbooks.com • www.accartbooks.com/us United Kingdom, Europe and Asia John Rule Art Book Distribution 40 Voltaire Road, London SW4 6DH T: +44 020 7498 0115 E: johnrule@johnrule.co.uk • www.johnrule.co.uk Rest of the World Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd 706 Kaivanna, Panchvati, Ellisbridge Ahmedabad 380006 INDIA T: +91 79 40 228 228 • F: +91 79 40 228 201 E: mapin@mapinpub.com • www.mapinpub.com Text © Debashish Banerji / Akar Prakar Illustrations © Ganesh Haloi Poem © Ganesh Haloi English Translation Debashish Banerji All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The moral rights of Debashish Banerji as author of this work are asserted. ISBN: 978-93-85360-93-0 Copyediting: Marilyn Gore / Mapin Editorial and Ankush Arora / Akar Prakar Editorial support: Akar Prakar and Neha Manke / Mapin Editorial Design: Ganesh Haloi and Shilpi Chakraborty Printed at Magna Advertising and Marketing
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SENSE AND SENSATION GANESH HALOI - 2021 ESSAY BY DEBASHISH BANERJI
A language of sense and a language of sensation Debashish Banerji
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Visual aesthetics is founded on the organization of space so as to convey an experience of beauty. Space comes with many expected organizations, which may be utilitarian, symmetric, perspectival, or heirarchic, each with its sense of aesthetics. These mundane forms of organization, with their explicit rationales and literal aesthetics, are “given” to us by the world. When we refuse these conventions, a strange land looms, one whose organization arises from the play of objective and subjective singularities. To use the language of Abanindranath Tagore, this play can be called antar-bahir jog.1 It is the domain of abstraction, where the principles of visual organization, such as form, colour, texture, rhythm, and quality of life-vibrations, are released to become elements and categories of spatial organization forming a subjective language for the objective constituents of world-making. Varieties of this phenomenological reduction were practised by several European modernists in the early 20th century. Prominent among its early theorists was Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), whose own art and book Concerning the Spiritual in Art became seminal influences in opening the gates of visual abstraction for modernism. Kandinsky attempted to apprehend environments at a level of subtlety where shapes lost their hard edges, and colours and textures became infused with emotional moods. The displacement of content gave no handle to the representational mind to make “sense” of the painted surface, awakening the pure intuition of sensation, operating through the eyes, but tending toward synaesthesia. A subtle rhythm in the arrangements of form and colour, for example, brought vision close to the horizon of music. The colour simplifications and design sensibilities of continental artists connected to the Bauhaus, including Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Johannes Itten and Lyonel Feininger had been assimilated by Bengal modernism by the 1930s, due to the efforts of Stella Kramrisch and the Indian Society of Oriental Art, which organized an exhibition of the Bauhaus artists in Calcutta in 1922. However, the tendency to canonize Western movements makes us forget that modernist abstraction drew on traditions of pre-modern and non-Western art, including Indian abstraction, which can claim a vast cultural imaginary of stylized form and ornament, juxtaposed colour planes, and strong linear rhythms. Haloi may have picked up some of the design sensibility of the Bauhaus by osmosis. However, and far more significantly, his long exposure to classical Indian art—particularly the paintings of Ajanta, while working for the Archaeological Survey of India—
along with his visually analytical mind and his years of teaching made him sensitive to indigenous resources of abstraction. His training in applied arts at the Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta (now Kolkata), strengthened his inborn analytical capacities and helped to collapse the dividing line between natural and artificial form and design. At the same time, these studies exposed him to the assimilation of East-Asian typologies of brush strokes, asymmetric compositions, oblique or mixed perspectives, colour washes and the exploitation of negative space that had preceded him due to the pan-Asian interests of the Bengal School. Of course, there were many who were exposed to all these influences, but Haloi’s powerful originality is evident in his selection and creative integration of visual and painterly properties in an abstract language that exudes the fragrance, and rings with the music, of his regional roots. As a predominant feature of this integration, one cannot but observe the mood of deep contemplation into which Haloi’s paintings plunge us. This feature, so characteristic of Abanindranath Tagore and many of his Bengal School students, has been conducive to the expression of hermetic sensibilities marking several Bengali modernists working in the shadow of the Bengal School; along with Haloi, one may think of his namesake, Ganesh Pyne, as inhabiting a similar space of interiority. In this series of small ink-and-brush paintings, we get a significant peek at the working methods of the artist. The sensory presence of the riparian landscapes of Bengal is never far from Haloi’s paintings, even when they refuse natural recognition. Aerial views of carefully planted paddy fields, shimmering bodies of river or ocean water, mountains and homes reduced to triangles on the horizon, bird-specks floating in the distant sky, waves, directional flows, the hint of a moon: this poeticism shows us his close kinship with the entire tradition of modern Bengali poets, from Rabindranath Tagore, through Jibanananda Das to Shakti Chattopadhyay and Joy Goswami. In a majority of his paintings from the past, colour planes and their relations were a powerful means of expressing these natural referents. In the present series, like the Taoist and Chan painters of East Asia, Haloi has reduced colour to ink and paper, revealing the pure asceticism of his structural method. All the referents of memory continue, but manifest entirely in monochrome. Here, all referents are equally analyses through reduction to elementary forms, kinship patterns that translate across borders, or rhythmic punctuations that evoke musical cadences like the
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Untitled 13 Ink & Brush on paper 12.5 x 12.5 inch 2020
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Untitled 1 Watercolour on paper 12.5 x 12.5 inch 2020
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Untitled 2 Ink & Brush on paper 12.5 x 12.5 inch 2020
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Untitled 8 Ink & Brush on paper 12.5 x 12.5 inch 2020
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Untitled 3 Ink & Brush on paper 12.5 x 12.5 inch 2020
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Untitled 4 Ink & Brush on paper 12.5 x 12.5 inch 2020
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Untitled 5 Ink & Brush on paper 12.5 x 12.5 inch 2020
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Untitled 6 Ink & Brush on paper 12.5 x 12.5 inch 2020
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Untitled 7 Ink & Brush on paper 12.5 x 12.5 inch 2020
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Untitled 9 Ink & Brush on paper 12.5 x 12.5 inch 2020
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Untitled 10 Ink & Brush on paper 12.5 x 12.5 inch 2020
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Untitled 28 Gouache on paper 10.75 x 14.75 inch 2020
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Untitled 23 Ink & Brush on paper 11 x 14.75 inch 2020
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Untitled 25 Ink & Brush on paper 14 x 16 inch 2020
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Sense and Sensation Ganesh Haloi 2021 Debashish Banerji
48 pages, 30 illustrations 10 x 11” (254 x 280 mm), sc with gatefold ISBN: 978-93-85360-93-0 ₹995 | $30 | £22 Fall 2021 | World rights