Toronto painter Denyse Thomasos’ posthumous AGO exhibit ‘just beyond’ pays homage to a towering talent

Ten years after her death, Toronto artist Denyse Thomasos is finally being honoured 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 Renée van der Avoird of the AGO, 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, many rarely seen, to show how [Thomasos] challenged the limits of abstraction, infusing personal and political content onto her canvases through the innovative use of formalist techniques,” according to the AGO’s description.

Born in Trinidad and Tobago and raised in Toronto in the early 1970s, Thomasos died at 47 after an allergic reaction during a medical procedure in 2012. Accordingly, the core strength of this show is its brilliant, chronological demonstration of how much she achieved artistically in her relatively short career.

Thomasos began creating her canvases at the age of 15 and studied at the University of Toronto, Mississauga and at Yale. Her early interest in monumental art and working at scale, as well as the emergence of her signature skull, coffin and cage motifs, were already visible in her paintings as a student. Dark, mysterious, and moody, the work hints at the artist’s growing concern for racism and foreshadow her later move away from figuration altogether.

In the 1990s, Thomasos’ work entered a critically 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 gallery room, “Dos Amigos (Slave Boat),” a magnificent, exemplary work from this transition period, shows Thomasos’ powerful use of line, gestural stroke and cross-hatching pattern, techniques that result in a dizzying work that evokes the artist’s main archetypes: the slave ship, the prison and the burial site. Eschewing European approaches to formalism, the painting signifies a deeply subjective art, fully engaged with slavery and its catastrophic impact on Black people.

The exhibition showcases Thomasos’ research-driven practice and technical skill. “She was always working physically in the studio,” says Canadian artist Linda Martinello, who worked as Thomasos’ studio assistant between 2010 and 2011. “She had this way of conveying embodied knowledge through movement and transition to line and colour, which resulted in her complex compositions.”

The show also emphasizes Thomasos’ willingness to push back against canonical traditions. As Frater writes in the exhibition’s catalogue, Thomasos “was able to eviscerate the notion that both the line and by extension the grid were merely motifs that formed the base of modern art.” Through her paintings, Thomasos showed how these elements “represent instruments that were weaponized in a manner to wreak the most brutal of violences upon Black bodies.”

A corresponding work, “Rally,” uses thick lines and colour to produce a large grid comprised of layered cells, suggestive of the dense, urban housing the artist observed while teaching in Philadelphia. The painting exudes the sense of living within unforgiving and stifling spaces. But its patchwork of vibrant colour also references West African textiles and an enduring hope and perseverance in the face of deprivation and death.

Wanting to escape New York’s daunting post-9/11 environment, Thomasos travelled extensively throughout South Africa, South and Southeast Asia and South America to deepen her understanding of domestic and Indigenous architecture. In her “Excavations” and “Dwellings” series, we see medium-scale paintings that present bright palettes and recurring use of the cylindrical form of the panopticon, a metaphor illuminating how — despite geographical and cultural differences — the spectres of intrusion and surveillance are universally experienced in the places we call home.

Archival materials displayed throughout the exhibition connect the dots between key stages in Thomasos’ development. Sketchbooks, photographs, and journal notations illustrate where creative ideas and directions germinated. Created a year before her death, “Kingdom Come” — a collection of preparatory, untitled paintings made for a site-specific mural — uses a surprising green palette and loose compositional approaches that differ from Thomasos’ previous works but continue her examination of our socio-economic relations with environments, both built and natural.

By the early 2000s, Thomasos had honed her prowess as a painter. In a second large room, her mural-scale (eleven-by-twenty-foot) painting, “Arc,” typifies her use of colour, gestural stroke and motif.

U of T Mississauga art professor John Armstrong, who worked closely with Thomasos, highlights “Arc” for the way it shows “rickety architectural structures precipitously perched on a hillside intermingled with figural references, such as skulls.” Armstrong, who was one of Thomasos’ early teachers and close friends, views the painting as a striking example of how the artist’s travel to Mongolia, Mali and Peru provided “architecturally inventive and makeshift forms that informed her work.”

Present also is the ribcage-like form that appears in several other paintings, including “Metropolis,” placed, as if in conversation, on an opposite wall from “Arc.” In their grand scale and thematic complexity, both paintings allude to the memory of Thomasos’ father (whose life the artist believed was cut short due to the racism he endured in Canada), bringing her artistic project into a wondrous and cohesive whole.

On a final exhibition wall, “Babylon” presents a busy cityscape radiating with an energy and irreverence that takes its cues from graffiti art. Here, Thomasos’ lines and cross-hatching patterns are absent, but the painting’s dimensions and composition echo a continuity with the urban structures visible in other works. Titled in reference to the Biblical city, the painting usually hangs in a grand hall at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, where both her wedding and funeral requiem were held, and so projects a near-spiritual presence that brings the show to a close.

With its thoughtful and expansive presentation of Denyse Thomasos’ vast oeuvre, the AGO retrospective provides a long overdue tribute to one of Canada’s finest painters. On display are the highly emotive and intellectually demanding works of a Black woman, mother, wife and artist who cared deeply about relationships, history, the environment and our potential for transformation. While her untimely death robbed us of knowing where she was headed next, what remains attests to a towering achievement.

Denyse Thomasos ‘just beyond’ is on now and runs until Feb. 20, 2023 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Go to ago.ca for more information.

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