Angelbert Metoyer

CLAY + COAL: MODERN SPIRITED ESSENTIALISM
Juanuary 28, 2019

For the grand opening night of Pre MACO, art enthusiasts, curators, museum executives, collectors, and art foundation directors walk through the entryway of Invex Banco Tower, in the Santa Engracia neighborhood, one of the newest luxury skyscrapers built in San Pedro, Mexico. The entry area displays, “Angelbert Metoyer, 2nd Floor.” Upon stepping off the elevator, and entering into a one of a kind exhibition produced by KRSTO and Angelbert’s Imagination Studios, one can see 40,000sq. feet of raw concrete space with 20-foot-high concrete ceilings and staggered 4-by-4-foot concrete support columns. In this refined space, artist Angelbert Metoyer exhibits for the first time in 15 years — six large-scale raw, minimal, charcoal, and pastel drawings on all-natural hemp fiber, a translucent material, with sizes ranging from 12-by-9-foot to 9-by-9-foot. In this enormous space, observed at a distance, each installation of Metoyer’s work is illuminated with such precision that the surrounding space remains in darkness, bringing complete focus to each display.

Metoyer also uses the exhibition to introduce a fully subversive environment that engages one’s senses. Two installations of over-sized, sculpted fabric are draped from the 20-foot-high ceiling. Projected on a concrete wall, adjacent to the drapes, the film Play For The Sun runs, produced and directed by the artist. Throughout the space a multi-channel sound installation saturates the environment. The ambient sounds created by the artist as sonic graffiti, operates as a composite of spatial noise. These installations, along with the drawings, open a relationship within the space between sound, object, and natural light. “I am revisiting drawings at this period of my life as a form of truth. Drawing is a pure form of mark-making and in its classical use it gives my art space for transparency. I am ready to share this truth with the world,” Angelbert states as he tours a few collectors around the exhibition.

For the past 15 years, Metoyer has drawn as part of his personal process in completing paintings, but never as a work for an exhibition. Drawings were something intimate, a reflection of his inner self that was to be kept secret. It was part of his private process. But drawing, as painting, is also a language. After experiencing the freedom of painting, he is exploring the freedom of drawing, a language that flows naturally from his mind onto the canvas.

The content of Angelbert’s work is best described by Heather Pesanti: “Metoyer moves through life with a fluidity and improvisation that both engenders the immensely creative art he produces and places him on the periphery of normative time and place: a practicing disciple of mythologized existence. The artist’s use of symbols, archetypes, and icons, his blending of the spiritual and cosmological with the representational and scientific, his interest in mining the rich layers of his own personal history as well as his subconscious, and his penchant for nomadism collectively form an expansive cosmology of art and life.”

Colector.