Ten years after her death, Toronto artist Denyse Thomasos is finally being honored in a stunning exhibition that invites us to think about the spaces and places that shape our lives.
The much-anticipated exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario – titled “just beyond” and curated by the AGO’s Renée van der Avoird, Sally Frater of the Art Gallery of Guelph and Michelle Jacques of Saskatoon’s Remai Modern – “brings together more than 70 paintings and works on paper, very rarely seen, to show how [Thomasos] challenged the limits of abstraction, infusing personal and political content into her canvases through the innovative use of formalist techniques,” according to the AGO description.
Born in Trinidad and Tobago and raised in Toronto in the early 1970s, Thomasos died at the age of 47 after an allergic reaction during a medical procedure in 2012. Therefore, the core strength of this show is its brilliant demonstration and chronological of how much she achieved artistically in her relatively short career.
Thomasos began creating her paintings at the age of 15 and studied at the University of Toronto, Mississauga and Yale. Her early interest in monumental art and scale work, as well as the display of her skull, coffin and cage motifs, were already evident in her paintings as a student. Dark, mysterious and humorous, the work hints at the artist’s growing concern with racism and foreshadows her later departure from figuration.
In the 1990s, Thomaso’s work entered a very important phase. Responding to social and political contexts and the death of her father, she created a series of large, black-and-white abstract works that solidified her architectural style and subject matter.
In the first room of the gallery, “Dos Amigos (Slave Boat),” a magnificent work exemplified by this transitional period, shows Thomasos’ powerful use of line, gestural stroke, and cross patterning, techniques that result in a stunning work that evokes the artist’s key archetypes: slave ship, prison and burial ground. Eschewing European approaches to formalism, the painting signifies a deeply subjective art, fully engaged with slavery and its disastrous impact on black people.
The exhibition showcases Thomaso’s research-driven practice and technical skills. “She was always physically working in the studio,” says Canadian artist Linda Martinello, who worked as Thomaso’s studio assistant between 2010 and 2011. “She had this way of conveying embodied knowledge through movement and through line and color, which which resulted in her complex compositions.”
The play also highlights Thomaso’s willingness to defy canonical traditions. As Frater writes in the exhibition catalogue, Thomasos “was able to debunk the notion that both line and grid were mere motifs that formed the basis of modern art”. Through her paintings, Thomasos showed how these elements “represent instruments that have been weaponized in a way to inflict the most brutal violence on black bodies.”
A related work, “Rally,” uses thick lines and color to produce a large grid composed of layered cells, suggesting the dense urban housing the artist observed while teaching in Philadelphia. The painting evokes the feeling of living within unforgiving and suffocating spaces. But her vibrantly colored patchwork also references West African textiles and an enduring hope and perseverance in the face of deprivation and death.
Wanting to escape the frightening environment of New York after 9/11, Thomasos traveled extensively throughout South Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and South America to deepen her understanding of native and indigenous architecture. In her Excavations and Dwellings series, we see medium-scale paintings that feature bright palettes and repeated use of the cylindrical form of the panopticon, a metaphor that illuminates how—despite geographic and cultural differences—the spectrums of intervention and supervision. with universal experience in the places we call home.
Archival materials displayed throughout the exhibition connect the dots between key stages in Thomaso’s development. Sketchbooks, photographs and journal entries illustrate where ideas and creative directions arose. Created a year before her death, “Kingdom Come”—a collection of preparatory, untitled paintings created for a site-specific mural—uses a startling green palette and loose compositional approach that differs from Thomaso’s previous works, but continue her examination of our society-economic relationships with environments, both built and natural.
By the early 2000s, Thomasos had honed her skills as a painter. In a second large room, her mural-scale painting (eleven by twenty feet), “Arc,” typifies her use of color, gestural stroke, and motif.
U of T Mississauga art professor John Armstrong, who has worked closely with Thomasos, singles out “Arc” for the way it shows “creepy architectural structures quickly placed on a hill interspersed with figurative references, like skulls.” . Armstrong, who was one of Thomaso’s early teachers and close friends, sees the painting as a wonderful example of how the artist’s travels in Mongolia, Mali and Peru provided “inventive and improvised architectural forms that informed her work.” .
Also present is the ribcage-like shape that appears in several other paintings, including “Metropolis,” set, colloquially, on an opposite wall from “Arc.” In their grand scale and thematic complexity, both paintings allude to the memory of Thomaso’s father (whose life the artist believed was cut short because of the racism he endured in Canada), bringing her artistic project into a whole. wonderful and cohesive.
On the last wall of the exhibition, “Babylon” presents a busy cityscape that radiates with an energy and irreverence that takes its cues from graffiti art. Thomaso’s interlocking lines and patterns are absent here, but the dimensions and composition of the painting echo a continuity with urban structures evident in other works. Titled in reference to the biblical city, the painting usually hangs in a great hall at the College of St. a closure.
With its thoughtful and wide-ranging presentation of Denyse Thomaso’s extensive oeuvre, the AGO retrospective offers an overdue tribute to one of Canada’s finest painters. On display are the deeply moving and intellectually demanding works of a Black woman, mother, wife, and artist who cared deeply about our relationships, history, environment, and potential for transformation. While her untimely death robbed us of knowing where she was going next, what remains testifies to a remarkable achievement.
Denyse Thomasos ‘just beyond’ is on now and runs until February 20, 2023 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Go to ago.ca for more information.
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