Denyse Thomasos

Flight

February 25, 2010 – March 20, 2010

At the core of my abstraction lie the rhythms and design compositions of African textiles such as, the Kuba and mud cloth designs and African Pygmy Birch drawings. My early abstraction consisted of flat patterning that captured the off-beat rhythms of these designs which often still can be seen in the backgrounds or initial layering of my current more spatial work.

For the past ten years I have traveled throughout the world collecting images of indigenous architecture and structures including dwellings, bridges, wells and temples to influence my abstract paintings and to broaden the spatial component in the work. I started in China and traveled through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Bali, India, Mali and Peru. I have used thousands of these images collected as research to inspire the structural nature of my work and add to the complexity of the form. For example, looking at the woven branches used in the structural foundation of Malian thatched homes, I have incorporated woven line into my paintings creating dwelling like spaces.

In my last show entitled ‘Excavations’ at the Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto, I focused on deep spatial quarry-like spaces. I called upon my travels through India for the color palette and rooftop housing found in the Rajasthan cities for the bird’s eye point of view in the work. However, for the structures within the quarry-like spaces, I drew from my trip to the Dogon escarpment in Mali. Here I incorporated into the paintings hanging structures that reminded me of the burial caves hanging along the cliffs of the Dogon, used by the Tellem people, the early ancestors of the Malian people.