Article by Prof Jean Louis Raymond

Ganesh Gohain exhibition
The Fine Art Company, Mumbai, India
April 7th -14th 2007

Between the materiological concreteness of the sculpture and the more abstract reflective space of painting, the recent work of Ganesh Gohain confirms his initial resolve to join, by his artistic gesture, the major movements which set up the order of the world. There, man and his memory become one with the matter and the forms, the elements, the plants, and the whole of the living beings. This quest of the unit, where the singular tends to merge with the universal, is a search of the absolute which inhabits Ganesh Gohain authentically.

He thus joins the great tradition of the Indian thought which is capable of acknowledging the presence of the divine in all the circumstances of the daily life. Thus, by entitling his exhibition “Temple of the Future”, he indicates to us that the work of art is the focus of contemplation and concentration.

On the ground, a path leads us there, “The road which I passed through”, made up from a series of modules, squares of molten aluminium scarified and juxtaposed, which measures space, separates it, lays it our. Work at the same time symbolic and conceptual, it introduces us with an approach to the whole of the exhibition in terms of journey, each work being able to be regarded as a stage.

The sculptures borrow the shapes and materials of furniture, “altar” tables and chairs in “pits of foundation”, wooden receptacles for polished or patinated bronze objects, symbols at the same time explicit and mysterious: matrices, seeds, eggs, rings, small volumes in the shape of house, mountains, prints of the hollow of the hand….While appearing like the representation of elements of a new intimate cosmology, (“Letter to father”/mythical mountain, the series of the “Chair for thinker”, “My Table-poem”, “My sculpture”…), these sculptures, in their rigorous complexity, awake in us the memory of the treaties of technical and ritual codings which governed the construction of architectures (Vastu-shastra) and the realization of the sculptures (Shilpa-shastra) in ancient India. They invite us to a metaphysical reading of the work which, under certain aspects, can be connected with the work of the painter Giorgio de Chirico. Closer to the body, within the reach of the hand, the sculptures of Ganesh Gohain keep us at a distance by waking up our imaginary. Like, in the exhibition, the reversed mountain (“Where is the mountain?.....) keeps at a distance the little bronze man.

Vis-à-vis this sculptural space, where the materials show themselves in the gravity and the heaviness if the terrestrial world, paintings of Ganesh Gohain invites us to share the weightlessness of vacuum, time, sign and memory. Their titles (“Letter to father”, “Letter to Vadodara”…) indicate to us that they are messages, addressed to fabulous recipients, to ourselves, of course, spectators.

The silence that they impose leaves us confronted with the existential questions which underlie them and which the poet Fiedrich Hölderlin evokes in this poem:

What is the life of men? An image of divinity.
As they all wander beneath the heaven they contemplate it.
While reading, to some extent, as in writing, men imitate the richness and the infinite.
Simple naked sky is it this rich? The silver clouds are similar to flowers.
And from up there fall in rain the dampness and the dew. But when the azure
clears, the simple blue, here appears the matte of heaven (which resembles
marble) such as ore: sign of wealth.

We can still perceive this “matte of heaven” in the open spaces of the imaginary that the work of Ganesh Gohain reveals, and that this exhibition invites us “to read, to some extent”.

(Jean Louis Raymond is a Sculptor and a Professor in Ecole Supieure Des Beaux Arts, Le Mans, France)