Reality becomes abstract by Peter Bevan
2010-2011

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?

(The author is from Glasgow School of Art, Scotland)