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// 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. He has been an artist his whole life, a multi-instrumentalist long before he was a painter; painting is now the central practice, worked 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

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. 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.

I have been an artist my whole life, a multi-instrumentalist long before I was a painter. I am self-taught. I work from a studio in Bangkok and I sign my canvases in lowercase.

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. I model them from the painted source, print them in resin, and finish every one by hand. Talismans, 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.

— 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
Flight for Safety by tijo (2026), 120 × 150 cm acrylic, oil stick and paint pen on canvas. A vertical neo-expressionist painting on a dark blue-black ground. At center stands a black totem-like figure outlined in thick white: a rounded head with white bars for features and two small cream rectangles for eyes, white bars down the torso threaded by a winding pink line, a small red heart outlined in white on the chest, and one arm raised with an open hand whose fingers are striped black and white. A loose yellow oil-stick halo floats above the head, and a scribbled yellow sun burns in the upper left corner. On the left a large blue scribbled bird head with a dark eye ringed in teal and red and a yellow-green beak faces the raised hand, with FLIGHT FOR SAFETY lettered small in pale blue above it; a chalk-grey ladder runs diagonally down from the figure’s elbow over sweeping blue-black brushstrokes. On the right, inside a blue scrawled frame, a boxy dark creature with one glowing white eye and a grid of square white teeth grins. The figure stands on a white block crossed out with a red X and split by a black scratched seam, and a broad red field sweeps in from the lower right, covered in layered white and pink handwritten lines including SAYING, love is patient, we live by faith not by sight, and God is faithful.
Flight for Safety
2026 · Acrylic, oil stick and paint pen on canvas · 120 × 150 cm
Bear Arms by tijo (2026), 150 × 120 cm acrylic and paint pen on linen. Two cartoon bears stand side by side against a deep ultramarine night sky under a scribbled pale full moon. The central purple teddy bear has white-ringed blue saucer eyes, pink inner ears, a pink snout, a red-framed mouth grid of white triangle teeth, a red heart on its chest, a hatched repair patch on one shoulder, and POWER lettered in dark blue down a cobalt strip at its hip. Its arm rises behind a smaller black bear with orange horns, orange flames burning inside white eyes, a single black tear, and fur scratched with a pentagram, stacked triangles, crosses, a star, a broken heart, 666 and other numbers. A large red balloon floats above them on a string. On the left, white missiles with lettered bodies, the tallest reading PATRIOT, climb on yellow flame trails over a small scrawled city and a row of green pines; quadcopter drones hover in the sky, small red balloons drift on white strings, and one white rocket bursts through a red balloon in an orange explosion. A royal-blue panel of scrawled words, INNOCENCE among them, fills the lower right beside the black bear’s leg.
Bear Arms
2026 · Acrylic and paint pen on linen · 150 × 120 cm
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 · Acrylic and paint pen on canvas · 200 × 160 cm
// Totems

The figures leave the canvas. Each is modelled from the painted source, printed in resin, and finished by hand — the machine makes the body, the hand decides who it is. The first character finished end to end is Marley, the dog from Boy & Dog V2: hand-painted in black, white, and pink, soles stamped 1/1 and signed. A Three Angels figure and the hand-sized Apophis talisman made the same trip before it.

The raw gray resin print of Marley standing on the studio floor beneath the Boy & Dog V2 canvas it was pulled from, the painted dog visible above its printed double.
Marley, 2026 · raw print with the source painting
Marley finished: the Boy & Dog V2 dog as a hand-painted resin figure in black and white with mismatched square-and-circle eyes, pink nose, a grid of teeth, and white ribs down the flank.
Marley, 2026 · finished, 1/1
// Fast facts
Born
Canada
Based
Bangkok studio · Hong Kong operations
Media
Acrylic, oil stick, crayon on canvas
Series
Pantheon · ELITE WAR · Totem Heads · Body Politic
Influences
Basquiat · George Condo · Hieronymus Bosch · 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 Canada, the US, Costa Rica, France, and the UK
// 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 calls · Collection inquiries · Totems & talismans
// Online
Portfolio: tijo.art
Instagram: @art.tijo