Osian's Auction Catalogue India The Passionate Detachment | February 2001

73 PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK 33 GANESH HALOI (b. 1936) Landscape S/d in Bengali, l.r. Water colour on handmade paper, 1999 100 x 101 cm. (39.4 x 39.8”) “Rather than calling them (Haloi’s paintings) abstracts, one could, I think, call his works distillations. The landscape can be read in them, glowing with the poetic sensibility of the best in the Bengal School. There is, surely, a marked and distinctive transformation towards pure line and colour, and yet it has a lyricism, a feel, an aura, rooted in the nature of poetry and painting in Bengal…But what makes his technical mastery a truly resonant art is the effortlessness with which it is wedded to his painterly perception, a sure sign of incisive creativity.” (Mukand Lath, rpt. in Response: Gouache & Transparent Watercolour, Chitrakoot ExC . 1999 ). “ Haloi seldom works with more than two colours evoking symphonically through a gradation of these a whole world of feeling and atmosphere…Every painting is like a Haiku poem… Like their art the accidental and the calculated have a wonderful timeless balance in Haloi’s world.” (Kishore Chatterjee, from Colours with a Touch of Silence , rpt. in G.Haloi, Lakeeren ExC. 2000 ). Rs. 250,000 - 300,000 $ 5,320 - 6,380