tijo.
Tijo paints death with a smile — Basquiat-rooted neo-expressionism that puts money in the mouth of the skull and refuses to be ashamed of wanting it: death, power, and value, stared at with appetite, not apology.
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 sold at a COVID-era charity auction, with 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.
My practice begins with the things culture trains us to flinch from — mortality, money, ELITE WAR, the shadow side of the human animal — and reaches 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 money, power, and mortality get personal. Skeletons with money in their mouths. Dollar-sign chains around the neck. NATO bars across the chest. Money worn in the teeth like jewelry — not an accusation.
I'm not scolding any of it. I want the money — the work is just honest about a hunger most people keep hidden.
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
160 × 120 cm · 2026
17 km/s. The asteroid is coming. The figure on the right has its hands up — surrender, or supplication, depending on the day.
- 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 · money · ELITE WAR · the shadow side
- Beyond canvas
- Totems (life-sized sculpture) & talismans (hand-held editions)
- Collected
- Private collections — US, Costa Rica, UK, France
High-resolution images of available works are supplied on request — email studio@tijo.art.