When I see in the Mirror' I see the Abstract... 

GANESH GOHAIN

The Polylogue

 The subject is both constituted through and threatened by the logic of signification.

  Ganesh Gohain is known to the art world as a sculptor but since a couple of years he has been working on large canvasses. He earnestly believes that this recent work is ‘sculpted’ in paints and though appears to be representational is abstract. He recons a certain metaphorical accent and also deems libidinal undercurrents in his idiom when he speaks about his work. He reads further mysteries in it while attempting towards elucidating his perception. Some of the viewers might not subscribe to his point of view and its justification but they would certainly sense his utmost passion and sincerity. In fact his subtle and sensitive delineations hardly need any verbal justification.

Ganesh, though is gifted with extra ordinary draftsmanship and dexterity with plastic material, has not kept himself confined to his representational skills. He is capable of modeling mimetic forms with utmost ingenuity and discarding them altogether if they are not warranted for. He really enjoys the felicity of visual language. Since a few years he has been employing photography as the point of departure in his recent work. The miniature photographic portraits in his earlier work like ‘The Home within Me’  are now replaced by carefully selected  ‘vistas’ from nature focusing on foliage, shrubbery, heaps of fruits and vegetables, beds of flowers etc. exploiting the multitude of similar but not exactly the same forms or shapes. The subtle variations in these forms escape the rigidity of geometric repetitions but retain the warmth of organic proximity and the playful delight of visual echoing. Some of them render the intricate and mysterious filigree of leaves and branches against the sky, virtually melting into it.

A critically selected section of such a photograph is then printed on a canvass which he says, serves as a ‘drawing’ to him. Ganesh ‘builds’ on these drawings with tiny paint blobs with the patience and precision of a pointillist but in preference to the rich pointillist palette, mainly in silver or white, gradually annihilating the chromatic chiaroscuro and the illusions of dimensions that are built through it. The forms and the voids born out of this process deconstruct the natural images into a non representational opus but this perhaps is not the reason why Ganesh pleads for its abstract nature. For him, Abstraction is not, in Ortega Gasset’s words, a manifestation of visual imagination, where the artists’ eyes, instead of absorbing things, are converted into ‘projectors of private flora and fauna’. And even if they do, the subject is so ‘unlovely’ that the viewer is forced to focus the attention on the art of painting and to give less importance to its subject. Ganesh too chooses ‘unlovely’ objects like brooms, bottle gourds, datoon or black berries but he certainly does not conform essentially to the formalist agenda. He not only relies heavily on the absorbed material but makes references to its details not only as objects but signifiers. While cladding them in silver or white, Ganesh almost strips them of their identity but in the process, they lend themselves for re-signification - Intended or unintended.

The titles of his earlier as well as the recent works, e.g. ‘Foot from Baroda’, ‘The missing Govardhana’, ‘My Table’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Poem’ etc. hint at some implications but they do not conjure up to any intended metaphorical connotation. His ‘Letter to Father’ transcends not only the emblematic but also the metaphorical probably because he does not start with a pre determined or pre conceived ‘meaning’. He intuitively works towards an uncrystallized idea. For him the method is as important as the result. It is like chanting a mantra, the act that has a fulfillment in itself. The outcome is deterministic, irrespective of the intentional and accidental. Julia Kristeva envisages every signification as the dialectical interaction of the symbolic and the semiotic, the two forces competing for expression in the language of poetry or any art. The symbolic is the aspect that allows to refer, tied to social order and logic. Semiotic processes predate the symbolic and are instinctual and maternal. The semiotic dimension of language is the music of poetry that exploits the unintentional, involuntary subconscious. In avant-garde art, Kristeva sees semiotic operations that she identifies with what she calls the polylogical subject. The polylogue here refers to multiple logics and speeches both, revealing the nature of the dynamic significatory process which she believes is musical and material. It is the rhythm of the unconscious but it is repressed and dematerialized in a signifying system when the expression lends itself to intentionality and specific objective.

Ganesh does not work with objectives - not even visual. He responds to his surroundings in visual terms, not necessarily drawing any inferences or conclusions. His work is his tangible rumination, which is instinctive, even indeterminate to an extent. It does not inevitably evolve the way he would want it to. Rather it does not evolve at all because evolution is condemned to determinism. Here in this case, it blooms in the pre linguistic ambit evading the logic of signification.

 DEEPAK KANNAL

 Art Historian and Sculptor, Vadodara

Mineral paintings’

Prof. Jean-Louis Raymond,

Sculptor, France                                                                                                    March 2013

Starting from the mimetic representation of the figure by means of photography, the paintings of Ganesh Gohain are crystallized in the emergence of a minimal structure that resists being covered up by means of painting.

The surface becomes a unifying vibration; the image tends to dissolve into the pictorial space (which Ganesh himself describes as an abstraction) traversed by the subterranean remains of an objective memory partially (or completely) freed of its legible referents. This series of paintings immediately evokes in the viewer the strange sense of a familiar world that is hiding, which in turn induces a desire for insistent attention, for here perception is not exhausted in the fleeting moment of one intent look. This is an encounter that builds over time. An inaugural presence that we understand will require repeated visits to penetrate its polysemy and its enigma.

The space of abstraction is set apart from the field of prejudices that reality supposes. Poetry and music were long the privileged domains for abstract artistic expression where the mind freed itself by accessing an imagination with no limit other than individual consciousness. It is thus that strangeness can become again a desire for sojourning: new forms emerge and transfigure minds and human relations.

Then Western painting also became abstract. The step was taken, radically, in the early 20th century by artists overwhelmed as much by the crisis of subject as by the rapid development of science and technology that would lead to the transformation of the world and, hence, to what we are in a way experiencing now: its ineluctable unification.

Among these technologies, photography—older—had long since caused a fundamental calling into question among painters and sculptors, whose central object was, in one way or another, the representation of reality. The unprecedented competition that this engendered during the second half of the 19th century carried within it the seed of a theoretical as well as aesthetic dynamic that would give birth first to impressionist painting and later to abstraction. With painting, this dynamic spread to all the other fields of endeavour in the visual arts.

Starting from this same period, important scientific discoveries were made in the fields of optics and wave and vibration phenomena, which objectively linked light, colours and sounds and, in so doing, questioned the hitherto prevailing perception of reality. Artists were among the first to understand the importance of these discoveries and to quickly learn from their consequences, which fed their evolution towards abstraction: perception went beyond figure; light had value in and of itself; the world of shapes was no longer strictly linked to the representation of visible reality. Not only did the field of shapes expand, but also the perception of historical works was renewed. In line with the thinking of one of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, artistic endeavour established itself once again as cosa mentale.

It is also what Ganesh Gohain, painter and sculptor, has long understood. It is also what defines and inspires him.

Thus, with an approach that might seem paradoxical, he undertakes to revisit certain aspects of the trajectory of the modernist painters by following the historical path which, from object to its representation, from figure to sign, from illusionistic depth to the objective materiality of surface, gave birth to abstraction.

This time, it is photographic images printed on canvas that serve as background and foundation. These photos are indiscriminately taken of plants, trees, flowers, vegetables and seeds encountered randomly in the city, in the countryside, or at markets. They correspond to formal sensations which are relative to the feeling of the essential vital force and its organisation and to the perspective dynamic power which animate Ganesh Gohain and constitute the very fundaments of his existence and his artistic thought.

Whatever an artist’s object of research or formal intention, painting always, ultimately, consists in covering a surface delimited by a frame, an architectural structure, a determined space. This imperious necessity engages him physically, and each gesture, each touch brought upon the foundation must find its accuracy, as much in terms of movement as in terms of matter and colour, in order to bring to light a vision and an aesthetic thinking.

In the paintings of Ganesh Gohain, this movement occurs in the scrupulous covering of the image by an infinite number of tiny dabs of paint in the palette’s shades of grey, white and silver, making it "almost" completely disappear. Only "almost" because, just as the vestiges of the foundations of constructions that have long since disappeared and been erased from the soil’s surface reveal the persistence of their imprints through aerial photography, his works allow only the structure of the original—buried—images to emerge. Their shapes thus stylized tend to become abstract signs contained in a space whose depth becomes rarefied to the point of sometimes appearing to be the objective destiny of the surface, outside of any illusionistic representation. Only long consideration will reveal to the viewer the presence of what, through this process, has become invisible while remaining in the memory underlying the pictorial space. These "floating" images, as psychoanalysts sometimes qualifies their own  listening, cause in the consciousness of the viewer a movement of oscillation between recognition of the figure and acceptance of  its absence, which is impossible to stabilise, establishing an uncertainty conducive to the suspension of knowing and to the imagination’s interpretation.

As for the sensorial perception of this surface, it is vibratory. And this is due, on the one hand, to the choice of the colour "silver", whose natural brilliance alters the light to the point that the viewer, moving to change, even slightly, his viewing angle, sees it in infinite motion (and this is the painting that at the same time reveals its physical nature by using its subtle reflections in the eye of the viewer from various angles of reflection). On the other hand, the vibratory phenomenon also results from the strictly pictorial treatment of the surface, which, in the manner of the pointillists, patterns the space through a recomposition of light described in juxtaposed dots; except that here, as in the first era of photography, it is a tonal light, in black and white, that emphasizes the contrasts and reduces the effects.

This results in the appearance of calm serenity that emanates from all the works presented in this exhibition.

However, the formal world delineated here is profoundly acted upon by violent tensions similar to those that the observation of matter under a microscope can reveal. From this point of view, the translation of Ganesh Gohain’s images into an abstraction of geometricised signs, enclosed in the material of paint largely devoid of colours, gives birth to a physical feeling of minerality in progress. This is in keeping with a consciousness—never extinguished in Ganesh Gohain the painter—both of his relationship with his materials and of his sculptor’s instinct. Moreover, referring back to his sculptural work of the early 2000s, we find gestures and intentions that are formally maintained in this new series of paintings. Ganesh Gohain the sculptor has always attached great importance to what we could call the "skin" of his sculptures. During that period, he was already spending an endless amount time pricking, evenly and entirely, all the surfaces of the wide curves of his extended volumes, producing a halo of light vibrations, subtle and enveloping, which gave the viewer the impression that they had partially escaped gravity. This aesthetic operation also had a major importance for him inasmuch as the effect thus obtained was also the result of a strange symbiosis which, as for Pygmalion and Galatea, sealed between him and his work, intimately and extensively covered by his sculptural "touch " (in an almost erotic way), an indelible existential link.

With his paintings, today, he seems to have exactly the same relationship. It is thus from his obsession with covering that is born the material of the painting, which he says he constructs like a sculpture modelling. Coming closer to the canvas, we can see how much "touch" is present, and even if the thickness of the paint is minimal, we see a slight relief reproduced with the regular rhythm of a multitude of these dabs, a delicate epidermis that the eye, as it moves farther away, seizes in a crystalline density of fossilized stone. These dabs, in their slow progression, are noticeably transformed from one painting to the next; they traverse the paintings and so reveal them, each developing a distinctive handwriting without breaking up the overall unity of the works exhibited.

It happens, sometimes, that shapes spring forth, claiming our attention again for a furtive identification that delights us—as if we were ourselves in the process of making them appear, of drawing them—; then they completely escape from us, without regret, like images we happen to recognize when, on certain nights, we tarry in contemplation of a full moon, it too silvery.

At the heart of the metamorphic alchemy at work in the genesis of these mineral paintings, colours are gradually absorbed until a number of them practically disappear. Those that persist resurface (yellow, pink, green, blue, brown), as by porosity, in water-coloured tonalities, diluted in igneous matter, cooled down, subdued, but definitively stabilized. They retain the memory of a very ancient radiance that imaginary geological upheavals have not managed to erase completely. Prisoners of geometries, they combine to bring about the affirmation of their deployment and permit the exaltation of cold, cosmic light, which contains them all and animates the painting here.

To this cold light, to these faded colours, four exceptions for four paintings.

First, an ochre sky for three of them, and a monochrome gold, as in the backgrounds of the Ravenna mosaics.

The ochre makes up a solid background, shaping the incandescence of an atmosphere of concentrated fire, of intense heat, upon which floats a mineral layer open-worked to let it show through and seized by the cooling of its surface; all of this creating the painting, among arborescent branches and crystal.

The golden painting—a mirror according Ganesh Gohain—, which originates light, a sun

of gold leaf, in closely-spaced squares, "touches" of paint here again, as if to radically illustrate and simultaneously undermine the remark by Denis Diderot, who said: "Painting has its own sun, which is not the one that gives us light."

From where does the light of these paintings really originate?

Throughout the exhibition, we are called to ask ourselves this question, without being able to answer it. The ambiguity of this origin finds itself carried through without exception in each of these paintings, to the last—the one that is entirely covered in gold.

This painting, beyond the objective obviousness of its presence, its simple radiance, and what, as aesthetic counterpoint to colour, it offers to the sensorial perception of the whole, symbolically shines light on a sacred dimension of existence that Ganesh Gohain, artist, has never ceased to express in the uninterrupted movement of his artistic pursuit.

‘Translation by Wimba Glasgow