Just Beyond

Denyse Thomasos

The Rooms Level 3 Main Art Gallery | October 12, 2024 – January 19, 2025

Reviewed by Luke Quinton

Sometimes it’s the smallest things that make you wonder about the state of the world. I went twice to see the expansive show of Denyse Thomasos paintings at The Rooms in St. John’s, and each time I was alone, entire galleries of her large-scale colour-popping work all to myself. Well, to myself and the security guards. Granted this was in the middle of the workday, but I wonder if those of us who value art as a moving force in our lives are able to reach and connect to the people who don’t?

For many years Denyse Thomasos was alone with these paintings too. And in one sense, the most important thing about this show is that we are able to see it at all. Thomasos, who died unexpectedly in 2012 (due to an allergic reaction during a medical diagnostic procedure) was born in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, and moved to Mississauga at the age of six. In this show we see a driven, talented painter who had made connections in Canada, but was ultimately drawn to the United States, first to graduate school at Yale, then as an instructor and a painter in a Lower East Side studio, trying to break into the spotlight. We see some of this side of Thomasos in a film made by her husband, Samein Priester, whose camera follows her as she convinces surprisingly long brushes to move a fat line of buttercream across a grey background. 

“What do I want?” she asks in the film. “I want to show New York that I am the best abstract painter.” 

This touring gallery show, “Just Beyond,” charts Thomasos’ progression from a student artist of figures, to a mature, confident abstract painter, fixated on the patterns of the boats and cages that for her represented a visual marker of the North Atlantic slave trade and the middle passage. She connected these to the iron bars of structural racism in the American prison system, where black citizens, despite being just fourteen percent of the American population, make up nearly forty percent of the incarcerated.

The bars and cages also form a broader, more personal metaphor. Thomasos blamed Canadian racism for snuffing out her father’s brilliance. She wrote that he “was a brilliant physicist and mathematician whom I saw suffer under racism in Canada.” That’s not on the gallery walls here as far as I could see. And in general the show requires a great deal of reading between the lines. 

The accompanying monograph does flesh out a few details, like the origin of her cross hatching and the sorts of boats  (African fishing boats, European slave ships) Thomasos was fixated upon. Really this is key information that should have been front and centre, to capture the broadest possible audience. Because what do Canadians really know about the history of the slave trade? I’ll venture an answer: not much.

Considering Thomasos died during a medical procedure, it may be worth noting that the impact of slavery continues. Compared to other racial groups in the United States, Black women have significantly higher mortality rates and shorter life expectancies.  

Ten years after Thomasos’ untimely death, her work received acclaim and attention as part of the Whitney Museum’s 2022 Biennial, as curator Adrienne Edwards published a New York Times essay detailing her personal discovery of Thomasos’ work, in a former gallery space in Queens, neglected and ignored behind plexiglass. Images of Thomasos’ work received top billing in the Biennial. Unfortunately “Burial at Gorée,” the work in question, isn’t here, for whatever reason. That’s too bad, because the chaotic, claustrophobic black hatch work seems like the obvious apex of Thomasos’ treatment of her themes of slavery and confinement, connecting the history of enslaved Africans to a contemporary viewer. 

Still there is lots to see and admire. Thomasos mastered a sense of movement and colour. Often we can hear a city working its loud magic through her brushstrokes, a satisfying cluster of lines and angles, rendering buildings in thick spurts of peach cream and light blue. 

In the back gallery are a series of possibly unfinished works, dating from the year of her death. In “Untitled 2012” the colours are delicious. It’s an intensely living thing, like a field that has just erupted in blooms, it feels generous — amazing you get to witness it. It’s okay to get lost in there. It’s also a relief to be at a new distance from the sharp corners of her cages and boxes, and prisons, although of course they’re in there too, if you look closely among the nineties’ neons. You’re forced to wonder here, what Thomasos’ next direction would have been.

For me the most enriching part of the show is found in diary entries. “My work is about cages, about enclosure, being envelope,” Thomassos writes on one page. “What is my idea outside or apart from a visual language,” she asks. It seems she was wondering what these paintings were saying. 

These are good questions to ask yourself, but it did seem she got there in the end, in these swirling constructions that sowed so many seeds of history’s old troubles, into the future and present. 

It was a relatively unassuming work that brought it all into focus for me, a great swirling assemblage of bars and cafes and structures holding people in, a space dashed with bursts of resistance and optimistic colours. Titled “Life” (2009) but if this is life, then we are also trapped inside, and total escape is unlikely. Even though this is a metaphorical architecture — we don’t usually see the buildings’ exposed ribs, they’re always smoothed behind concrete, wood, stone, plaster, and glass — you can’t help but think about Thomasos’ father. In a life like that it’s hard to be free.