I paint
death —
with a smile.
What I paint is death, my fears, the chaos, the unknown, the old stories of cataclysm and apocalypse, and the ancient symbols passed down around spirit and its continuity. Every time I show up at the canvas, I do not know what I am going to paint. The shadows form and pull me into a story I did not see there before. I focus on my breath and how I am standing. Often I end up in tears from being that present. Meeting the canvas that way lets me make peace with my death before it arrives.
Alongside the paintings I make objects. Ancient people did not only picture their guardians, they carried them, and the figures in my paintings want the same. Talismans small enough to hold in your hand. Totems built at the scale of a person. Not decoration.
The work is not bleak, and that matters. What I hope happens to someone standing in front of a painting is the same thing it gives me: the unabashed faith that destruction is part of our own story, and that rebirth comes after it.
I have travelled through a lot of countries and I have always been drawn to folklore, to the imagery and symbology people used to carry their oldest knowledge about being alive and not staying that way. My inspiration lives in the unseen and the often unspoken. Death. Chaos. The unknown.
I read the oldest stories as memory, not metaphor. The myths of falling star gods carry the record of real cataclysms, meteors and asteroids this planet barely survived, and I want that ancient memory passed down. The death I fear is not just my own. It is that of our species.
Tijo Gaucher is a Canadian painter working from his Bangkok studio, with commercial operations based in Hong Kong. His neo-expressionist work — acrylic, oil stick, and crayon on canvas — sits visually between Basquiat, George Condo, and Hieronymus Bosch, with thematic concerns running from mortality and the shadow to inheritance and power. His own line for the practice: “I paint death with a smile.” A lifelong autodidact and multi-instrumentalist, Tijo left school at fifteen to follow a self-directed education and hitchhiked from Canada to Central America at nineteen, drawn to its indigenous cultures. He has been making his whole life — music, businesses, paint — and painting is now the central practice the rest of it was preparing him for. The work extends beyond canvas to hand-held talismans (small editioned characters) and life-sized totems built at the scale of a person.
His central premise is alchemical: the profane, faced honestly, becomes profound. tijo paints what most people turn away from — death, blood, mortality, the inherited wounds we carry without choosing to — and reimagines these subjects through a lens of warmth, humor, and aggressive earth-toned color. “I paint death,” he writes in his statement, “but with a smile.” The intent is to render existential dread approachable; to make pain a friend rather than an enemy.
Behind the apocalyptic canvases sits a cosmology he takes seriously: the old myths of falling star gods read as species memory — records of real cataclysms, carried forward in story. The two works closest to that belief, Apophis and Impactual (both 2026), are the two he names as his favourites. “The death that I fear is not just my own,” he says. “It's that of our species.”
Recurring motifs include crowned skulls (The King, 2025), labelled anatomical specimens (Mo-KNEE, 2026), and the falling star made a god (Apophis, Impactual). Text fragments such as BLOOD, DESTINY, and KING appear as both compositional element and conceptual anchor.
tijo describes his process as “creative archaeology”: diving into the collective unconscious for the monsters everyone hides, drawing on primordial and ancient symbols. The work is not concerned with pretty surfaces. It treats the scary as raw source material and lets the marks argue with each other until they stop. The same source material extends beyond canvas into hand-held talismans and life-sized totems — ancient people did not only picture their guardians, they carried them, and the figures in these paintings want the same.
tijo works from his Bangkok studio. Hong Kong handles commercial operations, and all studio correspondence — exhibitions, acquisitions, blind commissions, press, and totem inquiries — reaches the studio at studio@tijo.art. Annie Persons, Studio Director, handles routing.
Works in private collections in Canada, the United States, Costa Rica, France, and the United Kingdom. Specific collectors withheld at their request.
- 2020First painting auctioned at a pandemic-era charity benefit, proceeds to a local animal shelter
- 2025–2026Studio sales and blind commissions across US, Costa Rica, and Asia
Five blind commissions for 2026 delivery — three complete, two ahead.
Forthcoming.
Inquiries — exhibitions, acquisitions, blind commissions, totem & talisman inquiries:
studio@tijo.art