IF one considers painting an entity alive, and Ganesh Haloi as the painter at work in its making, and follows the course along its journey, one cannot help resonating to that line by Jibanananda Das reverberating through the range of his works, in a subtle undertone: ' Give me a word, simple, great and enormous,/ like the sky itself, /Deep...'. The body of the work and the painter himself, bound together in the making, set the ground of the work and the lines vibrating in harmony.We wonder how the artist has absorbed and charged not our vision alone, but also the space of contemplation that gathers around our vision. And then slowly we come to realize that like our poet, the artist too with his works has been walking the ways and byways of the world for a thousand years; churning ever so perspicaciously his childhood memories of Jamalpur; his expanding perception and quest leading him on to the 'great, enormous, deep' vistas of Indian art in the caves of Ajanta. As he let the vision embodied in the images permeate him, he found the depths of pain cloistered there billowing into an idiom that carried the artist's tears, along with the feel of a mysterious, surging, desperate Nature; shaping ultimately into the inner anguish that erupts into creativity.
The sole energy that sustains the artist's ceaseless quest, crashing the borders, geographical and temporal alike, to open out a space of free give-and-take, is the artist's personal idiom, the idiom that gives him his strength, even as it draws on his loneliness; for the more you nurture your difference the more you welcome your distances; and that is how Ganesh Haloi's works spell out their inevitable distinctiveness from the works of his contemporaries and successors.
His distinction is marked in the visual rhythm of his works rippling into a dexterously sombre dance of shades and forms and lines in a liberatory mode; where grammar submits to the grammarian.
Ganesh Haloi's scenario today stands at a vibrating juncture where acceptance and rejection alike have defined his long artistic evolution, as he has measured with great sensitivity time and again the flow of his imagination coursing through layers of surfaces, skies and horizons, interlacing winds, sensing delicately what he would touch and capture for eternity. If there are occasions when we feel that the artist is getting trapped behind iron bars of his own making, there lies the promise that like the ever changing and proliferating human civilization and human existence rolling around the artist, his repetitiveness could be considered only too natural.
There are borders that crop up naturally and break down under the impact of an inner urge to break into Infinity–that is how Ganesh Haloi's works emerge–a line from his own poetry offering us a title for this exhibition of his works: Limits and borders crash into Infinity.