Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
Denyse Thomasos
58
Floor 6
Born 1964 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
Died 2012 in New York, NY
These paintings in Denyse Thomasos’s distinct visual lexicon use dense overlapping lines to achieve spatial distortion, a sense of chaos, and the intensity of events that are impossible to represent. As Thomasos has explained: “I used lines in deep space to re-create these claustrophobic conditions, leaving no room to breathe. To capture the feeling of confinement, I created three large-scale black-and-white paintings of the structures that were used to contain slaves—and left catastrophic effects on the black psyche: the slave ship, the prison, and the burial site. These became archetypal for me. I began to reconstruct and recycle their forms in all of my works.” As much as they refer to the violent systems and structures that shape our world, the paintings are deeply personal. Displaced Burial is also a memorial to her father: “Overall I’m not trying to give the audience a happy experience or a dark experience. I’m trying to give a complex experience. I really get the complexity of humanness.”
Displaced Burial / Burial at Gorée, 1993
Denyse Thomasos, Displaced Burial / Burial at Gorée, 1993. Acrylic on canvas, 108 × 216 in. (274.3 × 548.6 cm). Image courtesy the Estate of Denyse Thomasos and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto
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Denyse Thomasos, Displaced Burial / Burial at Gorée
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Adrienne Edwards: I’m Adrienne Edwards. One of the curators of the 2022 Whitney Biennial.
Jail is one in a triptych of paintings made during the artist’s formative years in 1993, alongside Displaced Burial/Burial at Gorée, which was the first of her large scale works and Dos Amigos Slave Boat. The first two are here in the Biennial. These works encapsulate the range of Thomasos’s social, political, and historical concerns and research-driven methods, which traversed the middle passage of the Atlantic slave trade, architectures of incarceration and immigration while acknowledging the impossibility of ever being able to represent these histories in their aftermaths, by testing the capacity of abstraction to hold and convey them.
Narrator: Curator Adrienne Edwards wrote about these paintings by Trinidadian-Canadian artist Denyse Thomasos in The New York Times. Edwards quotes Thomasos saying:
Adrienne Edwards: “I used lines in deep space to recreate these claustrophobic conditions, leaving no room to breathe, to capture the feeling of confinement. I created three large scale black and white paintings of the structures that were used to contain slaves and left such catastrophic effects on the black psyche, the slave ship, the prison and the burial site. These became archetypal for me. I began to reconstruct and recycle their forms in all my works.”
For Thomasos, enslavement and imprisonment are inextricably connected to systems of capture.
Thomasos explained: “Overall, I’m not trying to give the audience a happy experience or dark experience. I’m trying to give a complex experience. I really get the complexity of humanness.”