Speaking In Tongues: A Two Parts Exhibition
Tripoli Gallery presents part 2 of Speaking In Tongues: August 30 – September 30, 2024, which features new work by Angelbert Metoyer. The first part of the exhibition opened in Winston-Salem, North Carolina on June 27, and was on view until the 3rd of July. This iteration in Wainscott, New York opens on Saturday, August 30th and features several new paintings that have yet to be exhibited
Speaking In Tongues part 1 took place at the MUSE Winston-Salem as an experience commemorating the 4th year of the 1Love Festival, in a former Federal Tax Bankruptcy Courthouse. The 1Love Festival worked with Metoyer for 3 years and this year the artist initiated their artist-in-residence program, completing this large body of work being shown in both destinations; all works making the physical journey from Winston-Salem to Wainscott, and some works being included in both venues.
During the residency in North Carolina, Metoyer immersed himself into the Winston-Salem culture bringing his art practice and participation in social interactions and engagements including those with students at various institutions. The mission of the 1Love Festival is to cultivate transformative experiences that center and celebrate the African diaspora’s history and culture through art, innovation, entrepreneurship, and wellness. They see art as a catalyst for consciousness-raising and a pathway to promote cultural pride within individuals and communities and the debut of Speaking in Tongues was well received to a captivated audience with a verbal introduction form the Mayor of the city.
“My interest in Winston Salem was its name sake,” states Metoyer. “However, after discovering its connection in bridging the south and the northern regions of American contemporary art makers, [it also became about] putting an x in the earth for the unknown becoming known. There is a history of creators pre-Black Mountain [College] and the eventual moment of its extension into the Hamptons, in New York. Coming from the deeper southern states…there’s a certain impulse somewhere between what is quick and what is sustained like sound.” he said. “There’s something in the works created there that for me, will be connected to the place where something happened, is remembered and to adorn what is left behind.”
The talisman of the memory of time. The eternal language that can say everything in the blink of an eyelid that all can understand, Fear or none.
Working in a variety of mediums, Angelbert Metoyer has perfected his craft and aesthetic over the years. Some of his new paintings debuting at Tripoli Gallery such as 11011 (Self Portrait), TBT, and Rejoice (all 2024) reveal his interests, struggles and triumphs through his process and stylization of surface. This new body of work toes the line between abstraction and figuration. His vision is largely abstract, but every once in a while likenesses emerge through brush strokes and mark-making as if conjured by something beyond consciousness. Not unlike the artists who trained at Black Mountain College in the 1960s such as famed East End artist Willem de Kooning, Metoyer with Speaking In Tongues, participates in traversing a journey between North Carolina to New York. In this instance, his path follows those with artistic inclinations as well as ancestors who sought freedom on the land. The art on view reflects all of the elements on the East End of Long Island—sky, land, and sea. And his path, is a path of his own making, connecting historical threads of the past with his contemporary, living, breathing, and spiritual practice.
The act of painting is a translation of Speaking in Tongues. Rather than audible utterances, the body moves across the surface gesturing, choosing mediums, pigments, and forms. In this absence and presence of spirituality, a dialogue occurs often moved by the spirits. Art, and painting in particular, can be much like that, and the artist, in this case, Metoyer, must be available to each painting, a channel for whatever results on the canvas. | 
