Untitled, 2012 by Denyse Thomasos

Provenance:
Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto
Private Colection, New York

Exhibited:
“Denyse Thomasos: Just Beyond”, Art Gallery of Toronto; travelling to Remai Modern, Saskatoon and Vancouver Art Gallery, 8 October 2022–March 2023 (included in the AGO exhibition)

Literature:
Renée van der Avoird, Sally Frater and Michelle Jacques, “Denyse Thomasos: Just Beyond”, Belgium, 2022, listed page 170

Denyse Thomasos was born in Trinidad, moved to Toronto as a child in 1970, and practiced as an artist mostly in New York and Philadelphia. Her importance was well acknowledged during her lifetime (she received the Guggenheim Fellowship Prize in 1997, the Joan Mitchell Foundation award in 1998, and the New York Foundation for the Arts award in 2008, among other accolades), yet her powerful work has also been re–discovered in Canada of late. The Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto presented a memorial exhibition in 2012. She had a posthumous solo exhibition at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinberg, Ontario in 2021 and was celebrated in “Denyse Thomasos: Just Beyond”, another large retrospective seen at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 2022–23.

The website for the recent AGO exhibition suggested that “Thomasos conveys the vastness of events such as the transatlantic slave trade without exploiting the images of those who were most affected.” Her allusions to slave ships in some works is a case in point, both about the inclusiveness of ‘architecture’ in the form of ships in her painting and the ability to address trauma without replicating its effects through literal representation. Her unique form of abstraction is the key to this fine balance. Thomasos worked across more than the idioms of 20th– and 21st–cenury abstraction, never choosing one authoritative mode or rejecting figuration. Signature architectural elements structure her abstract images, frequently giving them a solidity and sense of deep space. Though not about specific buildings, her work can be thought of as architectonic in the sense that it structures our perception.

Painted in the last year of her tragically short life, in “Untitled”, Thomasos characteristically loosened the grids and structures that were central to her designs in the 1990s and that initiated her repute in the USA particularly. Her skill in suggesting a stable three–dimensional space and dynamic activity at the same time is on display in this painting, as is an ever more vibrant array of colours. Across the top, the openings of what can be read as a colonnade seem to recede, working in genial harmony with a portal created in the top right corner through the quick and broad application of yellow. These gestures create a rectangle through which we can peer. While there is no preferred focus or resting place in the overall composition, neither is it chaotic. Instead, Thomasos’s architectonic underlies her distinctive freedom with the texture, hue, and the application of paint and gives us an optical and emotional purchase from which to explore the many visual ideas present on her canvas.

Mark A. Cheetham is a freelance writer and curator and a professor of art history at the University of Toronto. He is author of two books on modern and contemporary abstract art, “The Rhetoric of Purity” and “Abstract Art Against Autonomy”.