Skip to content
LIVE
NOW PAINTING — STUDIO OPEN BY APPOINTMENT+INQUIRIES — studio@tijo.art+NEW WORK 2026+ALL CANVAS · ACRYLIC · OIL STICK · CRAYON+NOW PAINTING — STUDIO OPEN BY APPOINTMENT+INQUIRIES — studio@tijo.art+NEW WORK 2026+ALL CANVAS · ACRYLIC · OIL STICK · CRAYON+NOW PAINTING — STUDIO OPEN BY APPOINTMENT+INQUIRIES — studio@tijo.art+NEW WORK 2026+ALL CANVAS · ACRYLIC · OIL STICK · CRAYON+
// Press Kit

tijo.

Tijo Gaucher · Painter · Bangkok studio · Hong Kong operations
“I paint death with a smile.”
// In one line

Tijo paints death with a smile: Basquiat-rooted neo-expressionism that faces mortality, the shadow, and what we inherit with warmth instead of fear, made so a stranger can meet their own death in the work and smile back.

// Bio

Tijo Gaucher is a Canadian painter. A lifelong autodidact and multi-instrumentalist, he left school at fifteen for a self-directed education and hitchhiked from Canada to Central America at nineteen, drawn to its indigenous cultures — experiences that still shape how he paints the body, the earth, and the dark. Over the past year he has committed to painting as his central practice, working from his Bangkok studio (commercial operations in Hong Kong). His first painting went at a COVID-era charity auction, the proceeds to an animal shelter. And the surname is the joke fate wrote first: Gaucher is French for the left-handed one — the same left that gives the art world its favorite dismissal, gauche. He takes it as instructions.

// Artist statement

My practice begins with the things culture trains us to flinch from: mortality, the shadow, what we inherit without choosing to. I reach for them on the canvas with humor instead of fear.

My interest is less in the figure than in the body as a site where mortality, power, and inheritance get personal. Crowned skulls. Labelled anatomy. Apocalyptic skies. The figures with arms half-raised between worship and surrender, and the skeletons that grin anyway.

None of it is protest. Underneath the work is something closer to gratitude: the plain astonishment of getting to be alive at all, and the sense that facing death squarely is what makes the aliveness legible. The smile is what is left when the fear burns off.

The marks are deliberate, not precious. These paintings are made to be stood in front of — in galleries and museums, at the scale where a stranger has to stop, meet their own death in the work, and smile back. If a piece lands in a private collection, good; but the ambition is public: to put as many people as possible, anywhere on the planet, in front of the thing they flinch from. Painting, totem, talisman — three modes of the same archaeology of the unseen: the canvases to stand before, the small ones to hold death in your hand.

— tijo

Apophis by tijo (2026), 160 × 120 cm acrylic and oil stick on canvas. A neo-expressionist landscape painting on a black ground, depicting a dollar-sign apartment building on the left, a hairy GOAT figure in the center with the word "Goat" inscribed, and an orange-robed figure with raised arms and a horned purple-pink mask on the right. Includes the text 17 KM/S, MPH, 500, and 3,000,000 — a reference to the near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis.
// Featured

Apophis

2026 · Acrylic and oil stick on canvas
160 × 120 cm

17 km/s. The asteroid is coming. The figure on the right has its hands up — surrender, or supplication, depending on the day.

// Selected Works
Purrgatory by tijo (2026), 200 × 160 cm, painting on canvas. A neo-expressionist frontal cat face filling the entire canvas: a yellow and gold mane radiating outward in long strokes, edged by a continuous looping black scrawl; two large orange eye-masks holding half-closed eyes — white with blue half-moon pupils and single gold-stroke lashes; pink-lined triangular ears; a dark plum triangle nose; and a monumental grin of two rows of thick white squares set in an orange lattice framed in gray, spanning nearly the full width. Black whisker strokes scratch across a light green panel and an ochre panel on either side of the mouth.
Purrgatory
2026 · 200 × 160 cm
Impactual by tijo (2026), 300 × 150 cm, painting on canvas. A neo-expressionist panorama: at left a large purple-and-black beast in profile with a red-and-white eye set in a dark ring, a long jaw lined with white zigzag teeth, and an ochre-yellow slab across its chest, set against a cobalt-blue panel scrawled with pale glyphs. At center a black volcanic cone erupts in dense orange, yellow and coral scribble that spreads across the upper canvas in scratchy crayon lines. To the right, the word DIE is lettered three times in chalky pale strokes on a dark ground; beyond it a large cream moon ringed in warm pink and orange hangs above a small black spectacled creature perched on a horizontal wire. In the lower right, three round green flower-creatures with wide red grinning mouths and blue eyes stand on thin black stems in a field of green and magenta marks.
Impactual
2026 · 300 × 150 cm
A Pack of Lips by tijo (2026), 300 × 160 cm, painting on canvas. A neo-expressionist menagerie across a three-meter canvas: at left a pink line-drawn winged figure with a ringed-planet head stands in deep indigo night painted over a textured gold under-layer; at center an orange double-coil sends a red beam into the mouth of a long-necked green creature with a purple horn, a red eye, a stitched grin, and purple rings across its body; a small green crocodile with a toothy grid grin carries a red imp across the creature's back through hand-drawn flames, under a burning orange curtain barred with black. Two grinning green daisy-flowers stand at its feet, and in the lower left a small house with a red roof and two wide blue eyes watches over a sleeping beige mound-creature.
A Pack of Lips
2026 · 300 × 160 cm
// Totems

The paintings translate into 3D-printed characters; five stages take each figure from digital mesh to hand-painted finish. The current translation is a figure from Three Angels, printed in gray resin and finished by hand; the hand-sized Apophis talisman made the same trip before it. Same demon, out of the frame and into the hand.

Sections of the Three Angels prototype curing on a wire rack inside a dehydrator: the round gray resin head and glyph-marked leg pieces laid out under the steel panel.
Three Angels prototype, 2026 · curing
The Three Angels prototype mid hand-finishing, held up in the studio: body painted black with the bone and serpent chest markings picked out in white, glyph text running down the legs.
Three Angels prototype, 2026 · hand-finishing
// Fast facts
Born
Canada
Based
Bangkok studio · Hong Kong operations
Media
Acrylic, oil stick, crayon on canvas
Series
ELITE WAR · Totem Heads · Body Politic
Influences
Basquiat · George Condo · Rothko · Rashid Johnson · Banksy
Themes
Mortality · the shadow · inheritance · gratitude
Beyond canvas
Totems (life-sized sculpture) & talismans (hand-held editions)
Collected
Works are held in private collections in the US, Costa Rica, the UK, and France
// Press images

High-resolution images of the works are supplied on request: email studio@tijo.art.

// Contact
Tijo Studio · Annie Persons, Studio Director
studio@tijo.art
Exhibitions · Press · Studio visits · Collection inquiries · Totems & talismans
// Online
Portfolio: tijo.art
Instagram: @art.tijo