WAR-BEAU: ICON EXECUTION
ICON EXECUTION IS AT THE G.R. N’NAMDI GALLERY, CHICAGO FROM SEPTEMBER
Angelbert Metoyer first conceived the thirteen large-scale drawings at the heart of Icon Execution when he was traveling through small villages in China, where many people were infected with HIV/Aids via a corrupt and bungled blood donor program run by the Chinese government in the late 90s. He became fascinated by a folkloric tale he heard on the road about a young Chinese student who had been systematically ‘executing’ memorials to The Communist Party and The Red Guard. Metoyer was told repeatedly that in the dead electric hum of night this heroic student would stencil an execution hood over the heads of those depicted in memorials with Banksy-esque stealth and precision.
Earlier this year, the story of the student resurfaced in the artist’s mind when he witnessed a public performance orchestrated by the arts professor Richard Lou, which provided a damning indictment of Memphis’s equestrian monument to a famous confederate general (a man with a history characterized by slavery, Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan). Metoyer subsequently began to make studies of the monument and performed an homage to the mythological Chinese student by drawing Abu Ghraib-style execution hoods over the head of the figure upon horseback. In doing this, Metoyer considered himself to have undertaken the role of a time traveler, whom he conceived as the alter ego I-AOI: the conceptual personification of a cosmic trickster who has the ability to mould space and time.
http://www.angelbertmetoyer.com/wp-content/uploads/video/m~Windowwebsite.f4vThe role of I-AOI in Icon Execution is to make a clear and profound statement about the spectre of racism at the heart of American society, and tear out the cancerous monuments to war that Metoyer believes will be detrimental to our evolution into a higher species. The artist thinks there is no better place to make this statement than Chicago, the veritable Valhalla for those from the South who fled to the North in the fight for their freedom. In the show, Metoyer turns his attention on equestrian monuments all over the United States compiling a demonology of confederate generals whom he executes with his dexterous craft: Icon Execution therefore witnesses the Namdi gallery itself transformed into a celestial conceptual space where history is boldly rewritten.
Metoyer was also heavily drawn to the plight of the horses depicted in the monuments he studied and seeks not only to crucify those in their saddles, but also to guide the attention of the viewer to the way in which these innocent creatures have been historically sacrificed in the pursuit of violence, warfare and political domination. To act as a foil to this human domination of the species, Metoyer has also chosen to exhibit Clouds: one of his largest paintings of horses to date. This huge and complex piece takes up one whole wall of the gallery space and depicts the four horses of the apocalypse as they are described in The Book Of Kings 2. This massive, highly personal and rarely exhibited painting explores what Metoyer refers to as the hidden language of religion, and incorporates in its make-up myriad waste elements taken from the earth, highlighting Metoyer’s theory that from waste and decay can come a new form of beauty.
In Icon Execution, Metoyer also exhibits four of his groundbreaking glass-based pieces that deconstruct the apparatus of time, memory and moment. Metoyer’s dizzyingly codified M Windows are informed by his notion that time only exists as a personal psychological experience contained by the parameters of subjective perception. The M Windows exhibited in the exhibition recreate Metoyer’s ‘mind:memory:moment’ equation within the context of an artwork made up of various still images that deal in the arena of war and beauty. The placement of these still images upon each other within sheets of gold-dust-flecked layered glass creates holographic movement within the work that is intended to encounter the path of thought in the viewer: providing an intervention in space and time where a war and beauty are presented in a state of eternal potentiality.
The final element of Icon Execution is a very public screening of four of Metoyer’s short films, all of which are projected out of the gallery windows an into the street at night. These films were shot during his travels all over the globe in the last ten years and they provide a heavenly white light in the darkness of the city, and a portal into the eternal daydreams that inform the artist’s practice. In this way, Metoyer invites passers by to visit the celestial transcendental home of his I-AOI confederate demon hunter myth and experience a space where the ghost of the racist past is eradicated.
For more information contact
John-Paul Pryor: Curator
+441 07969 266 548
pryor.johnpaul@googlemail.com / warbeau.metoyer@googlemail.com
