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