Word getting out on tale-telling works of Angelbert Metoyer
Something exciting is happening at Joysmith Gallery.
Through the end of this month, Memphians can get a look at the visceral, energized work of Angelbert Metoyer, and if he isn't a household name yet, just wait.
Art by Angelbert Metoyer will be on display at Joysmith Gallery, 46 Huling, through February.
Works by Angelbert Metoyer meld populism, folk art, post-modernism and Harlem Renaissance with Afrofuturism.
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The New Orleans-born, Houston-reared artist, whose Creole descent, sense of heritage and eclectic palette have earned comparisons with Jean-Michel Basquiat, is primed for the kind of acclaim and popularity reserved for few modern painters. And right now this star on the rise has 18 mixed- media works hanging at Joysmith in what is a major show for both the gallery and our city.
"I've been chasing him for three years and happily he let me catch up with him," says gallery director/co-owner Robert Bain, who adds that Metoyer will visit Memphis in April to create, among other things, a body of work for the gallery.
Talking from Kent, England, where he currently lives, Metoyer, 32, says he is looking forward to spending time in Memphis and taking in the local culture. An avid traveler, he has been busying himself of late with multimedia projects involving film and the documentation of sounds around the world, recording in Hong Kong, France and elsewhere, then assembling the results so they "make their own sound," he says.
Metoyer's paintings operate in a similar fashion, an invigorating mash-up of style, medium and voice that welcomes at once fine art and populism, folk art and post-modernism, the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism, the physical and spiritual, the personal and archetypal.
The result -- as in the visual excavation demanded of the viewer by the canvas "Black Aurora" -- is a complex layering of imagery and messaging that seamlessly bridges the span of space and time, the Black Diaspora from West Africa to the Caribbean to the American Deep South distilled into one fluid gesture of his brush.
In Metoyer's amazing work, you feel the thread of living history, a continuum that finds a place at the table for famed muralist John Biggers (an admitted influence) and self-taught master Thornton Dial.
Metoyer the storyteller and bearer of black identity is a griot or jeli in the most profound sense of the term. He is also one of the most fascinating and fecund minds active on today's international art scene. Visit Joysmith and see what the buzz is all about.
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Paintings by Angelbert Metoyer
On display at Joysmith Gallery, 46 Huling, through Feb. 28. Call 543-0505 or go to joysmith.com.
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