- Prof. Jean Louis Raymond
- Prof. Deepak Kannal
- Prof. Harvey Hood
- Sculptor Peter Bevan
- Ganesh Gohain
- Interview By Moushumi K
Mineral paintings’
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.
Jean-Louis Raymond
Sculptor
Professor at the Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts du Mans-France
Translation by Wimba Glasgow, March 2013
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.
Dr Deepak Kannal
Ex Dean and Head of Art History Department
Faculty of Fine Arts
M. S. University of Vadodara
Ganesh has been living and making sculptures at Berllanderi for the past four months and has become part of our family. He works like a trained athlete - experimenting and taking on new influences, digesting them, and then perfecting the process of his execution. I remember visiting a museum in the South of France where Picasso had worked for a year. As you went from painting to painting with dates only a few days apart you would see some motifs repeated and new ideas developing. Moving along the walls the paintings developed in such a way, from day to day, that you felt you were with Picasso in his decision-making.
I was a little surprised when Ganesh started modelling a large foot similar to one he had made in India. There is a need for all artists to quickly fill a space with work to demonstrate who they are, but as the modelling was nearing completion, I was aware that this work was more than moving your mind to another culture; it was a confirmation of the idea and a testing piece. While ideas developed and some of the processes took time to dry and set, he would work on drawing and paintings, not as substitute for making sculpture, but on parallel ideas to their own media. Ideas fed each other, interweaving from sculpture to painting to drawing, similar to my own experience of seeing Picasso's daily process in the South of France.
The work that Ganesh produced has its roots in the suitcase be brought with him to Berllanderi as you would expect, but through his athletic rigour he has developed new ideas, which were not pre-conceived. I believe this is a significant body of work and I am grateful to him for enlightening me in an area of spirituality that I have long neglected.
Harvey Hood
Sculptor
Director of Berllanderi Sculpture Workshop, March 2003
REALITY BECOMES ABSTRACT
The title of Ganesh Gohain’s exhibition raises questions as to what we understand to be reality and the meaning of the word abstract.
In all world cultures, the Visual Arts have been primarily concerned with representing the world’s appearance to us through our eyes. This optical bias in Europe and America, eventually led to the development of photography, thought now, to be the most accurate technology to show us what the world looks like. It is considered more reliable than our own unaided sight, producing representations of the visible world, which are universally understood.
Since the emergence of Modernism in the early 20th century, there has been a prevailing tendency to distinguish sharply between representational and abstract art and consequently, a polarising of artistic production towards extreme oppositions and practice. However, when one surveys the wide range of artworks, which could be described as abstract, or abstractions, but which contain elements or merely traces of representation, we might come to think that such a simplistic polarity is not useful. This is surely endorsed when we acknowledge the huge changes in our understanding of what reality is, through the evolving discoveries of physics, biology and cognitive sciences. However, scientists themselves acknowledge that each new discovery alters our understanding of the real world and our place in it, generating new kinds of images of reality from the micro to the macro. This confirms that all science consists of evolving inter pretations of reality, rather than definitions.
We understand that an artist’s representation of the visible world is a personal interpretation of reality and that this interpretation is also subject to differences in his or her cultural and historical context. Does this suggest that all art, including representational images, is abstract?
In Ganesh Gohain’s exhibition, “Reality becomes Abstract” the first impressions are of a series of light-medium grey canvasses with subtle textures in which are embedded finely drawn natural structures. They generate an atmosphere of rather sombre and serious silence, but their rich intricacy invites our curiosity to engage with them more closely. One realises that the ubiquitous greyness is actually produced by the silver paint, which covers most of the paintings; being partially reflective this silver is unevenly responsive to the ambient light as we move through the gallery space. The surfaces are covered with a mesh of fine silverwork sometimes reminiscent of Mughal jali work or the intricate patterning of surfaces in miniature paintings.
One discerns more closely, the presence of representational images beneath this silvery sheen; images of leaves, a delicate tracery of branches, patches of shadow or dappled patterns of sunlight or moonlight passing through foliage, and we realise that these images are articulated with the descriptive precision of a photographic language.
Ganesh uses his camera to see and notate natural phenomena in his locality and on numerous trips further afield. He has accumulated a vast archive of visual images, which is also a kind of memory bank. These images encapsulate place, time, emotions and thoughts, later providing the subjects of his paintings. He describes it as a kind of drawing, both through the camera lens and in later editing. Certain significant images are then enlarged and printed onto primed canvas. Finally, the images are, in a sense, re-drawn through the subsequent over-painting with silver; the original photographs undergo a metamorphosis, becoming abstract.
The density of descriptive detail in these images is mostly occluded or veiled by the silvery surface layer, but some fragments are selectively revealed in gaps in foliage or between branches, through irregular cracks in melting ice slabs, or like petals floating on a liquid silver surface. As we move along the series of paintings, taking oblique views of the works we register the reserved colours in these underlying images. There are purples, blues, golden yellows and ochres; hints of the naturalistic colours of photography, like old hand-tinted, black and white photographs and even earlier silver and gelatine prints.
Two works appear slightly different; in "Image from my studio" the veiled photographic image appears to be of man-made houses, clustered together as if in a village. But we realise that they are too close together for even the closest of real communities; there is no space at all between them. They are in fact, miniature sculptures of an iconic house; a cuboid with a pitched roof, made by Ganesh, arranged and photographed to suggest an intimate community. It is a constructed metaphor for a real experience, rather than a representation of a particular locality; it is an abstraction.
In "Several dots" we see an image of a foot, but it is presented as an image as seen by its owner looking down; as we would see our own feet. Here, the layer of silver paint is almost literally, a mesmerising veil, suggestively obscuring our intimate gaze. This intervening barrier is a metaphor for the lack of clarity in our visual perception and of the artist’s memory. The images of previous experiences in his photographic archive are reworked and inevitably modified by the constantly changing selectivity of memory. It is as if the reality of the photograph alone is not enough; perhaps it must be visually contextualised and personalised to become more real?
Ganesh says he is a modeller, not a painter. If one looks closely at the textured layer of silver paint one sees a painstakingly repetitive, circular pattern of brush strokes leaving a hole in the middle, through which a tiny fragment of the underlying photographic image may be glimpsed. There may be many hundreds of these holes or dots in each painting, so from a distance they coalesce to reveal the ghostly image beneath. He relates this technique to traditional clay modelling, in which small balls of clay are applied to build up the imagined, or observed form, which slowly appears and is clarified, as they accumulate. In these paintings the silvered "pointillist" surface suggests a mysterious misting-over of naturalistic imagery, like condensation on a glass window softens and obscures the view beyond, generating a visual abstraction.
The artist conceives this silver layer as a metaphor for his own skin, which covers the photographic images derived from experiences and memories. In this sense, although Ganesh uses the technology of photography, which is considered the most accurate visual language to represent reality, he chooses to obscure them and therefore, question their apparent truthfulness. In these works he reminds us that our perceptions and our memories are selective and fragile. They may be better described as imaginative constructions, creatively perceiving the world in our own image.
Perhaps then, all our perceptions of reality are abstract?
Peter Bevan
Mumbai/Glasgow, 2010-2011
He is an artist who has adapted traditional modes of art practice, to create works which engage with the world dominated by western notions of art, but without a loss of authenticity, ie: "indianness". The vital and living traditions of India are inspirational to his work but are incorporated with elements of contemporary international art, such as, minimalism, installation and performance art. In this way Ganesh fuses past and present not only within his own iconography but through an internationally resonant language of forms.
For him, sculptural materials have a metaphysical meaning, for example, the ambiguous use of polyester resin, which is made to look like stone, presents a tension between image and reality. The considerable quality of his craftsmanship is not intended to impress with mere dexterity but to register another set of meanings into the whole spirit/matter network. As he says... "each mark, each dot on the surface has its own important meaning, like repetition in ritual chanting". Both in conceptual orientation and in the essentially rounded and pneumatic characteristics of his modelling, Ganesh Gohain is consistently within the tradition of Indian sculpture. He espouses this tradition and the importance of connections between generations.
Ganesh Gohain’s conception of art is metaphysical. He has a desire to fuse all aspects of his life, including art, into a meaningful whole. And although he manipulates cultural and in some instances, universal symbolism, his metaphysics are also a network of personal reflections. They revel in historical and philosophical sources incorporated with autobiographical references too subtle to be anything other than enigmatic. But this is their strength. These works truly emerge from a fertile imagination, replete with metaphor, connecting the spiritual, the cultural and the material, bound up with the logic and the humour of personal history.
These suggestive works mobilise our associative faculties and generate connections between external and internal worlds. They are about analogy as a fundamentally proactive mode of perception, fully sensual and conceptual, gestured towards understanding. They demonstrate the urge to connect; part to whole, visible to invisible, known to unknown, individual to group.
Ganesh Gohain’s inate drive for connectedness, within his own life, within his culture and across cultures, is also a desire to be part of a global network of understanding difference and similarity. All human perception involves a simultaneous perception of the self and the environment, it is an evolutionary principle of survival but also for development. |It is an ecologically conscious perception which defines the self as relational rather than self-contained. We actively shape our inner and outer worlds psychologically and physically to power the motor of understanding. Ganesh Gohain's work engages with the world in this way, his present emanates from his past and is pregnant with his future.
But he is not a philosopher; his approach is as an artist. In his work and ………..through the way he works, he acknowledges such issues, and presents to us moments of awareness and personal insight, in which we can share. His works stimulate the viewer to become aware of their own sense of being, sense of identity and of their relationships with others. Gohain refers especially to family relationships and those with other persons from whom he has learnt about life and about art.
Peter Bevan
Glasgow School of Art
April 2003
When I see the mirror, I see the abstract. A form has density, whether it is hollow or solid. The density of the form is an abstract.
Abstract is a concept of infinity.
Ganesh Gohain
A liar searching for the truth...
One sees a streak of "Baul" like mystical bearing when an artist declares that he is a liar searching for the truth. Be it the Baul like mystique of mind or Buddhist monk like incantation of certain typological series with some recurrent metaphors and signifiers evolving into a conceptual language of art, sculptor-painter Ganesh Gohain’s discourse seems to be philosophically contemplative. With professional training in centers like Fine arts faculty of MSU, Baroda, Glasgow school of art, or Berllandery sculpture workshop, Wales, UK, Ecole Superieure Des Beaux Arts, Le Mans, France and the initial study in the college of Arts and Crafts, Guwahati, Assam; the artist who emerged in the Indian art scène during the mid nineties, has been fervently mastering the fine skills of the sculptural hands . What are the things and thoughts these sculptural hands have attempted to capture so far? How and why and how far? Through a brief dialogue, we tried to frame a reasonably life-like sketch of t Ganesh Gohain’s artistic endeavor, if not a complete portraiture...
MOUSHUMI KANDALI: Whenever we see your works we see in them a triadic relation of the spiritual, cultural and the personal. The interplay of physical/metaphysical, real/surreal in your renderings speaks about a covert transcendentalist in you. What do you have to say in this regard?
GANESH GOHAIN: Visual expression depends on visual experience. It is an individual experience. More than spiritual, it is personal. No one visually experiences the same. The thread of these experiences is grounded in one's own origin, the root, where one belongs; the surroundings with which one interacts. Physical/metaphysical, real/surreal- all these binaries are almost embedded in our bones. Hence it is metaphysical, transcendental. It is the interplay. The very act of work itself is a spiritual experience. It also depends on one’s insight. When I say "I Exist"- everything else is interrelated to the very fact of my being. In a way, I do not have direct answers for these questions.
Titles of my works are actually questions, not answers; questions to myself. They are the abstracts of a ‘thought’, not a direct link to the work. "Letter to My Father", "Towards The Sky", "The Road Which I Passed Through" etc. are questions. In fact, title plays an independent pivotal role in my work. Mostly image comes first not the title.
In another title, "The Book on Ladakh" the result of the thought is physical, but the thought itself is metaphysical. I believe, the visual is realistic, but the vision is metaphysical / abstract. Thought is the main key here. The environment which the work creates is important. A particular moment created on a particular environment. How to bring Ladakh into this environment is the task. Art always not necessarily speaks by itself. At times it demands a clue. The transcendental comes from these experiences. Like the notion of birth is in itself is metaphysical. The work on Ladakh, as a result - is physical, the thought behind is very much metaphysical. The word ‘Real’ has multiple meanings. Everything is there, as I ‘I exist’; everything revolves around the ‘thought’. The search for the meaning is the metaphysical. The moment you start looking for the meaning it becomes transcendental.
MK: Certain recurrent motifs – a foot, eggs, trees in their web-like formations, a solemn meditative face, door frames, chair, etc – springing up as some personal iconography gathered in the process of the lived-experiences can be seen in your artistic oeuvre. At times we see the re-location and re-collection of your past/previous works as in The Table or Letter to Father. Why? Is Memory or an urge for a thread of continuity the vital force of your creative drive?
GG: I believe in language. I do not intend to emphasize on the motifs or the icons exactly. Rather it flows spontaneously. These icons, motifs, are all around, within the spectrum of our own religio-cultural practices. In my work they do not stand only for the representative purpose. It is again more about the experience of experiencing, not to specify any meaning attached to it. It is more of gathered personal experience.
When my father died, I was not around. I could not touch him for the last time. When I returned, there was a void in place of him. That realization of the void created by the absence of him remained within, which appeared on different occasions, different ways later. This sense of void also created a kind of illusion developing towards certain images. I am a visual intellect. Everything is visually oriented; the visual comes first then the aesthetic. Though, 'The chair' is a metaphor; it is not merely a metaphorical exploration to me. They are intermingled, the meaning and the metaphor. Perhaps we can see something similar in Brancusi, the father of modern sculpture. Who simplified the images almost similarly as in the Hindu iconographic representation of the Shiva Linga. He had experience it in the way which could be transmitted to others. So, I did this work as a tribute to Brancusi "A Book on Brancusi". The abstract is more important in total, to experience this shared experiences.
MK: Ok, then tell us something more about your tribute to Brancusi. Why do you feel this special connection with him?
GG: I think Brancusi is the father of Contemporary Art, not only of Sculpture. The shift was the turning point, which Brancusi had brought in. People critiqued him as a designer at times. But it cannot be restricted within these limited peripheries.
I have observed the minimalistic tendencies in our own cultural/traditional expressions. I do not want to be Brancusi of India, but he is important. The thread that unites me to him is important. History never leaves us, no matter it is old or recent. Without the quest "why", one cannot sustain. That does not imply you keep asking why all the time! It is more within you, the query should remain.
Many people say, keep the eight doors open, who has seen that eight door? May be we have more than the eight doors, thousands and thousands of them.
MK: Multiple realities, multiple possibilities...right…well, your works like “The seed becomes Mountain” also contemplates on the duel-identity of any being or object. What drives you to explore this inherent duality in nature?
GG: The space of my works is nature. May be the duality you mentioned could be explained through another title: "We Will Never Be there....The Pedestal of Air" which focuses on the aspect of Being/ Non Being. My practice is not result oriented; it is the process through which one can put forward the questions. They are not the mathematical hypotheses. It is the process of realization of the work, through the work. The act of making itself; the time and space it attempts to recreate. Everything behind the title is incidental.
The fact that "he seed becomes mountain" is realized only after I had gone through the experience of it. The void within the mould created the mystery here. While separating the two parts of the mould to unveiled the original cast, I realized suddenly that the mould is actually unveiling more. It opened up the both: the clear and the unclear.
Void itself is mysterious. The mystery should remain as mystery.
The visual memory reacts, it is a physical experience. Work is a relatively satisfied process, not fully satisfactory. The moment it satisfies you, it will stop. I am in the process, have not found the answers yet. There is no definite answer or end to anything. It is a constant attempt to reach out to the new set of questions. The urge for this should remain, otherwise with Einstein’s invention on relativity it should have stopped there. Till the mystery is not created- a work is not complete. When the mould is separated, the emptiness created the visual magic. Clarity is attained through the ambiguity of it.
MK: From Homer to Ulysses, Sartre to Tarkovsky, the concept of "Home" as a phenomenological, intra psychic, multi dimensional experience has been a much speculated subject. In some of your work such as "In my bag", we see a similar kind of speculation. How do you conceptualize it? Is "Home" the mirror of your "Self"?
GG: May be, yes! In the more recent version of ‘In My Bag’, it could be a reflection of the self.
House, here, does not stand literally. They are more like words floating around. In a way home is a non existential term for me. It is again a mystery. "Thoughts" could be home, which changes its shades, time to time. It is a vision, which has various links, to the origin, the native etc. Like mirror it reflects the opposite reality. Though it seems, it is not the actual reality. Rather more abstract than a representational reality.
I am a landscapist. It is difficult for me to go with the phrase "Home is the mirror of the self", instead, it is "The Portrait of the self".
My inclination towards this form/structure could also be linked to the occupational background of many of my immediate family members, who belonged mostly to the engineering field. This is how I see the link between the recurring architectural elements in my work.
MK: You seem to adhere to the notion of “Material-as-Metaphor” or this belief that sculptural material has/ ought to have a metaphysical meaning of its own. You call your stone the painted polyester resin. How do you explore the possibilities of a material?
GG: Yes, material speaks.
Material is chosen, what the image demands. That is how I visualize the vision. Vision is the perspective of the image. Here treatment is important. It has an aesthetic value. Experience produces meaning.
Sometimes material is metaphorical. Bronze - as the word suggests - has solidity, the visible mass, or the heaviness are its characters. While casting a bronze sculpture this solidity has to go through the process of melting, losing its characteristics to take a new shape.
In the work “Foot from Vadodara”, resin is only a medium, not material .It is used to create the feelings of a stone, hence it is a synthetic stone. To create a meaningful image is important, that is the demand of the work.
MK: "Foot from Vadodara", "Letter to Vadodara", "Torso from Vadodara" - with so many sculptural "Odes" to Vadodara, this adopted "Home" of yours springs up almost like a metaphor. What does this metaphor mean to you?
GG: As I said earlier, mystery unveiled retains its charm. Yet I have something more to say here.
You can say it is a tribute to Baroda, it is my adopted home. More than home indeed! This is my Gurukul. Somewhere I mentioned earlier that if my birth place Axom is Devki, then Vadodara is Mother Yashoda to me. This is where I live and work. I am emotionally attached to it. These are also relative terms, home, adopted home etc. If we go back to the title "We Will Never Be There; The pedestal of Air", in the similar term, you are attached at the same time detached to it. Like Bhagvad Geeta says, Work is the main thing above everything.
MK: It would perhaps be not impertinent now to map your artistic transition say from the "Nine Pots", "White Coffee blue pillows" to "Letters to Father" or the "The road that I passed through". You seem to be lingually inclined to a minimalist/ conceptual/ abstractionist mode of expression. Is this entire process a metamorphosis or a continuum of continuity?
GG: Our thought changes time to time. Belief transforms. I am not a saint yet, but aspiring to be one. In the beginning I never termed my work as minimalist. It is not always true. To become a saint one has to learn to discard everything. Time is important in terms of existence. Modernist minimalist had a behavioral tendency to negate, somehow. In my case I would like to portray more of the positive. You might find some negative elements in it; my prime attempt is for the opposite.
Metamorphosis is more appropriate term. Continuum of Continuity? Yes, but not in terms of repetition. Nothing can be repeated, can we? When we chant the word Hari or Ram or anything like that, after a point it does not remain the same. The vibration of it changes. With repetition things transforms.
If you see the past, the history, things repeat and thus, transforms. In the contemporary context, Museum is the Temple. That is how, my works too are transforming, towards the wider periphery of this notion of the: "Temple of the future".
MK: Can you just elaborate on this notion-- Museum is the temple . Do you see Museum as the "Temple of the future?"
GG: My art is a visual study of the past to present and present to future. I can visualize a connectivity from primitive/prehistoric to Renaissance to Contemporary and may be to the future and see the Museum as the sacred site where art in such connectivity can be witnessed. Hence it becomes a temple, a place for meditation and the future temple.
MK: I would like to ask you one vital question here in this connection. I see an inherent link between the various simplistic/ minimalist/ abstractionist kind of traditional sculptures, the iconographies, the simple, un ornate architecture, or various cultural forms of your native place Assam and your gamut of lingual expression. The central place of worship in the inner precinct of the Kamakhya temple where we find no idol but a dark sacred pool of water called the Yoni of the Goddess or the Shiva Linga of the Shivdoul of Shivsagar are for me some of the finest examples of such abstractionist imagination. Have you at any point of your life been inspired by such religio-cultural representations of your native place?
GG: Yes always. It is within me. I grew up with those inherited perceptions. One always collects, like the bees collect its honey. It is always additions never subtractions.
I am now coming back to the "Temple of the Future", which I en-vi-sage as a book. May be not exactly a book- an encyclopedic expression! The book without an end.
In Sibsagar, Axom, The Shiva Linga of Siva Doul has an interesting representation, which is unlike other Indian expression of it, it is concave. In my earlier practices I intentionally used such direct imageries to create the similar environment.
The concept God is a mysterious feeling,
Sometimes my works are big, much bigger than it appears. As in "Gift" it breaks the boundaries. Like in the myth of Sati, different body parts are scattered all over and each became a holy place in India, Kamakhya being one of those places.
It is an engulfing process, which accommodates everything. The inherited perception as well as the experiencing one, moves parallel. It is not of borrowing but accommodating of the whole.
I am a liar, searching for the truth……
Interview by Moushumi Kandali