Burial at Gorée is a mural-scaled painting of a chaotic and perspectivally contradictory interior space that New York artist Denyse Thomasos (1964-2012) created in 1993. From 1990 though 1995, Thomasos lived in Philadelphia, where she wrestled with balancing her developing interest in abstract painting with her continuing need to reflect in her artwork her identity as a Trinidadian Canadian living in the United States. Thomasos was mindful of the international reach of Trinidad’s colonial history of slavery and indentured servitude, which subjugated Indigenous Caribs, Africans, and South and East Asians, and found parallels in Philadelphia’s colonial history. Thomasos’s paintings that preceded Burial at Gorée specifically (and less abstractly) represented the 18th-century slave ships that transported kidnapped Africans from the Guinea coast to landings along the Delaware River. In some of these large-scale paintings, her motifs included slave ships’ claustrophobic sleeping platforms, and in others, representations of the ships’ looming hulls.

The attitude of disquiet and menace is present in Burial at Gorée, with the black-and-white gestural brushstrokes that she characterized in 1993 as “lashes of a whip.” Thomasos built her dramatic layers of orthogonals of perspective over many painting sessions, to slowly create a constructed space that neared a point of congestion. She characterized congestion as being both a visual phenomenon, as well as a physical reality: the risk of too many strata of painted marks merging to become as undifferentiated, inexpressive mass of flat acrylic paint. Thomasos thought of the space depicted in Burial at Gorée as being that of a holding area or place of confinement for slaves arriving in the Delaware Valley. Burial at Gorée was not Thomasos’s original title for the painting. Some years later, she renamed the work to point to her original intention. The Île de Gorée, an island off Dakar, Senegal, was used as a debarkation point in the 18th-century Atlantic slave trade.