I paint
death —
with a smile.

I'm doing my own form of creative archaeology — diving into the collective unconscious for the monsters we all hide. My inspiration lives in the unseen and the often unspoken: the shadow side of the human experience, the things people usually shy away from. Death. Chaos. The unknown.

I find resonance and deep connection in the primordial — ancient symbols, indigenous cultures, the oldest images we have for the things we fear. The scary is my raw source material.

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 Rothko, with thematic concerns running from mortality and money to power and ELITE WAR. 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 — music, painting, businesses — his whole life, but committed to painting as his central practice over the last year. 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, money, 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.

Recurring motifs across the work include crowned skulls (The King, 2025), labelled anatomical specimens (Mo-KNEE, 2026), apocalyptic skies (Apophis, 2026), capitalist iconography — dollar signs, brand-name word stacks, dollar-sign architecture — and the asterisk-eye figures and atomic-orbital diagrams associated with the Basquiat tradition. Text fragments such as BLOOD, DESTINY, KING, ELITE WAR, and 17 KM/S 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 — small editioned characters to hold death in your hand — and life-sized totems built at the scale of a person.

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.