Participating Artists: Ganesh Gohain, Santana Gohain, Kenji Harari, Christophe Robin & Balise Raymond 

Date: 22^nd November 2004 to 4^th December 2004, Sarjan Art Gallery 

THE FRENCH CONNECTION 

Is Crossworld a cross-cultural Art exposition having representative participation from France, Japan and India? Perhaps not, as the five artists participating in this show Blaise Raymond and Christophe Robin from France, Kenji Harai from Japan and Ganesh Gohain and Santana Gohain from India do not seem to represent different lineages. Rather all of them seem to adhere to the same visual culture divulging a marked French accent. The reason behind this common adherence is fairly obvious. Three out of these five artists-Christophe, Ganesh and Kenji are products of the same school that is Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts Le Mans and have worked under the tutelage of the same teacher, Prof, Jean Louis Raymond Blaise studied at Ecole Regionale des Beaux Arts de Rennes. Santana did printmaking from Barada and is the only one of the five who did not study in France, reveals a surprising affinity with the idiom they employ which can be broadly described as the a-political contemplations, tracing their lineages to the conceptual art of 60's and 70's. However, these artists do not surrender the optical refinement of their work for the conceptual purity as the conceptualists did. They treat the optical refinement and conceptual purity with equal love and respect. The concerns of these artists are overtly metaphysical/philosophical and the images they device to materialize them are apparently transhistorical and transcultural. It would be proper to call them visuals rather than images as what they portray are not objects. 

For instance Ganesh Gohain claims to portray nothingness in his We will never be there, sculpting the air and providing a pedestal to that unseen sculpture. The other sculpture by the same artist I am you built in sound and the visible part of the sculpture once again is the pedestal and not the sculpture proper. 

Blaise Raymond's prints are composed of depiction of various hand tools used for household jobs but what he actually 'draws' is the space around the objects and the object finds visibility through the void. 

Christophe erases the letters from a printed newspaper isolating and leaving only the ones that are used to signify the musical notes like do, re, mi which are trapped accidentally in the printed matter. These found notes hovering randomly in the newly created space emerge into accidental music frozen in visual signs Kenji does not believe in creating the visuals, instead he chooses the ones which already exist but never assert as objects or entity and invites the viewer's perspective by strategically placing shutter less windows or empty frames against them. 

Santana tries to fathom the mystery of the presence and absence of human relationship by placing her subtly painted canvasses together, For her it is not the canvasses put together but the space in between and their growth on each other is significant. 

It is interesting that all of them are fascinated by a challenge of representing the 'absence' and what they construct is not an image but the void. However the similarity ends here as their intentions and the means they device for this purpose are different. The visual symbols they generate for the given purpose are non- discursive revealing no specific visible onslaught of the visual culture they originally belong to but their symbolization is culture specific. Ganesh though assumes a position of a distant, indifferent onlooker; it is a position of a believer propagated by The Indian Philosophy since centuries. The indifference born of the non-conformism substantiated by the European rationalism that is reflected from Blaise's or Christophe's work is temperamentally different than the former. Kenji and Santana are more intuitive in their attitude but Kenji inherits the contemplative wisdom of his philosophical tradition, Santana on the other hand is more individualistic, intense and impulsive. This distinction, though a little simplistic, would help to understand their aesthetic endeavors. 

Deepak Kannal.