Angelbert Metoyer

21 January - 19 March, 2005

"The University Art Gallery, UCSD presents Angelbert Metoyer in his first West Coast solo exhibition. Metoyer’s work is a complex paradigm of incongruous shapes, found objects, math, science, ancestry, and spirituality, all intricately laced together. His compositions are made up of multiple parts to create an analogous whole – part star chart, part family tree, part diary and part official document; tied together with iconography, wit and style. But although each creation is saturated with information, the works are at the same time surprisingly serene. To add to this contradiction, Metoyer’s work seems at time innocent with his improvisational gestures; but combined with highly symbolic marks of religion, cosmology and mythology there is also a sense of sophistication and the idea that Metoyer is creating a larger scheme to be decoded. The combination of past and present resides in the works of Metoyer. His art on one hand follows in the tradition of his father’s people, ancestors who were medicine men in the villages of the Gold Coast in Africa. Metoyer is also an artist who engages in contemporary time and place. He is well aware of the rational and technological bias of popular American culture and revels in the challenge of introducing his unconventional and magical vision of the world."