Ganesh Haloi's large-scale exhibition held in Kolkata

The selected artworks span six decades of painting.

From his early works with imprints of figural images to ever transforming colour fields where nuances of abstraction allude to personal memories and affective experiences that shaped his responses to nature and architecture.

Haloi’s early works captured the various impulses observed in the natural environment - flood, breeze, ploughing of land or crossing of the river. The mighty Brahmaputra as the lifeline and its various moods, the marshy lands and rich aquatic life all come back to Haloi when he recalls his house in Jamalpur on the river banks.

Water used to enter their aangan/courtyard often when the river became forceful. The ‘aangan’ as the first enclosure experienced as a child, both fenced and open, protective and vulnerable at the same time, evolved into leitmotif recurrent in Haloi’s artistic oeuvre.

Photo courtesy: PR Team

Later on, Haloi’s visual imagination stretched this primordial form of spatial enclosure into an expansive field, with the closed boundary left broken or incomplete, allowing recollections to flood-in.

It is the earth and the way the earth moves, its seasons and cycles, its space and time continuum that are ruminations closest to Haloi’s life and his art. His biographical writings abundantly and vividly recount earth as the matter and metaphor for life.

Abstraction in its most subdued iterations unbinds the tangible site and dissolves the definiteness of objects to emphasize the poetics inherent in a fragment, a minute detail, a shadow, a trace or a perceptive moment.

His pictorial fields with borders and enclosures open up to swatches of ploughed and sown fields, amorphous water bodies with deeper colours, a filigree of fluorescent fragments