The first impression of the AGO’s career retrospective of Denyse Thomasos, “Just Beyond“, is that of the incredible size of her works. Meters tall, and wide, the works that welcome the visitor provide impose themselves into view — they cannot be ignored; their subject matter arresting. Thomasos had an unfortunately short career, and left behind a legacy of intricate architectural abstraction. The AGO’s retrospective arranges a selection of her works through two large spaces, and a handful of smaller rooms.

At first blush, and without familiarity of the artist’s work, Thomasos’ symbolism can be hard to spot. The AGO’s exhibit does an excellent job of leading the viewer through, grounding them in artist’s focus on structures of oppression, migration and racial politics. By the end of my time in the exhibit I could spot the wireframe panopticons, boats, hashwork cages, and spider like ribcages even when densely buried beneath or within other structures.

The gallery made a point showing academic, early works, and process documents. Here, the AGO lays out pages of the artist’s thought processes, alongside visual experimentation. It gives a thorough window into the construction of the context the artist worked within, and her relationship to history.

Thomasos’s academic work — which I have not been able to find online — is visually quite distinct from her professional work: figurative works depicting Black and Immigrant experience, or parables of racialized history. You can see the beginnings of her later work: heavy use of strong contrasts and washed out colour, a deep concern with oppression. Her allegories of confinement provide us symbols that recur over and over in her more abstract works: skull forms, boats (or coffins), and rib cages.

Dos Amigos (Slave Boat) is positioned early in the exhibit, as one of the artist’s earlier works. Its massive size is imposing, and its intricate architecture draws the viewer in. I found myself sitting in front of this piece ten or so minutes. During that time, I found painting expand itself into space, and I gained a sense of entrapment. You can trace the silhouette of two large forms — coffin-like, or boat-like. The exhibit uses this piece to ground us in everything we will see from this point forward, though evolved and turned into forms.

Thomasos’ time in Pittsburgh brought colour, and a difference sense of architecture. Thomasos took note of the colourfully painted neighbourhoods of the black, and marginalized communities, (Renée van der Avoird et al., 2022) and this brought a new evolution to her work. Here the exhibition brings forward the muddy greens, and dripping paint that entered the artists’ work — moving beyond the strict hard edged lines of earlier work.

The exhibit shows how the artist was always pushing into new areas. Here, in Metroplis, we see a city merging with or contained by a ribcage form. The artist used the ribcage as a symbol stand-in for her father(Renée van der Avoird et al., 2022), and so here perhaps we see a history of racial oppression (the cage buildings) that her father contained and experienced.

The exhibit closes with Babylon, and impressively massive work. Here, the artist had evolved again, bringing in what from my eye look like graffiti forms. I see masks, and perhaps animals, in and amongst the familiar cages forms of the artists earlier work.

I’m left with a great appreciation for this artist whom I had known little about, and a strange sense of mourning in their exploration was over.

References

Exhibition Catalogue:

• Renée van der Avoird, Sally Frater, and Michelle Jacques (eds.) (2022) Denyse Thomasos: just beyond. (s.l.): Art Gallery of Ontario, rRemai mModern, and DelMonico Books • D.A.P.