Denyse Thomasos: just beyond

Ten years after her untimely passing, the Trinidadian-Canadian painter Denyse Thomasos remains one of the most relevant voices in contemporary painting. Her exploration of the built environment as a field of power addresses urgent themes of migration, race, and survival. Beginning with an inquiry into the modernist grid as a technology of oppression, she deftly transformed these political concerns into rigorous yet lyrical abstractions. Co-organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and Remai Modern (Saskatoon), Denyse Thomasos: just beyond traces subtle mutations within the artist’s trajectory, as her canvases came to embrace more overtly emancipatory spatial practices — without ever losing sight of their imbrication within networks of power and prejudice. Beginning with her early period as a talented figurative painter of monumental public artworks animated by anti-Apartheid engagement, the exhibition shines a spotlight on Thomasos’s transition to abstraction in the wake of her father’s death mere weeks prior to the start of her graduate studies at Yale University. A spectacular trio of black-and-white canvases from 1993 bears witness to this sea change; she retains the massive scale of her figurative murals but employs cage-like forms that allude to architectures of confinement associated with the transatlantic slave trade. In conjuring the claustrophobic rationality of slave ships and slave castles, she retrieves a repressed history of the supreme emblem of modernist utopianism, the grid, as a technology of racial confinement. Subsequent paintings trace the longevity of the grid as a matrix of containment. Her dense cross-hatchings simultaneously evoke the enclosures of the contemporary prison-industrial complex and the high-density housing that marginalized populations disproportionately call home. However, as co-curator Sally Frater notes in her illuminating catalogue essay, the vibrant lattice of a work such as Rally (1994) also draws attention to the role that the built environment can play in enabling community formation. The retrospective links this “aesthetics of survival” to Thomasos’s cultural identity. Denyse ThomasosRally, 1994.Photo: Andre Beneteau, © The Estate of Denyse Thomasos & Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto The liberationist dimension of Thomasos’s art becomes increasingly prominent in later bodies of work, in which she investigates handmade domestic architectures from around the world. And yet, as Frater underscores, the vernacular structures that the intrepid artist documented on her global travels also recall the invasive sightlines of a panopticon — the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s design for a prison premised on the ubiquitous surveillance of its inmates. This unresolved tension between individual isolation and communal liberation is most clearly legible in paintings such as Dwelling — Tower of Babel and Dwelling — Prison (both 2005 – 06), whose structural components seem to morph between coffins and boats, prison cells and communal shelters. Whereas the towering Arc (2009) returns to the darker themes of confinement and death addressed by Thomasos’s pivotal black-and-white series from 1993, the looser gestural vocabulary of the equally massive Babylon (2005) anticipates the exuberant evocations of street art in her final, and in some cases unfinished, works. This timely retrospective ultimately presents a hopeful portrait of an artist grappling with oppressive histories and their ongoing legacies — an artist whose career was tragically cut short. Denyse ThomasosDenyse Thomasos: just beyond, exhibition views,Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2022.Photos: © Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Adam Lauder, Denyse Thomasos

Denyse Thomasos: just beyond

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