Ouattara Watts stayed under the
radar for the last few decades.
He’s back with a show at Karma Gallery and the
Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire.
Ouattara Watts stands with his arms stretched at his sides. Ouattara Watts at
his art studio in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Photo: Mogoli for
The New York Times By Zoë Hopkins Nov. 21, 2024
The artist
Ouattara Watts usually enters his studio in the Bushwick neighborhood of
Brooklyn under the blanket of the night. He has often worked between 9 p.m. and
8 a.m. for most of his five-decade career. It is in the relative quiet of these
hours that Watts says he can most clearly hear frequencies otherwise muted by
the daytime buzz: those of otherworldly and occult elements that appear in his
paintings. Even during the day, Watts’s sanctum-like studio felt a world apart
from its industrial environs. On the afternoon of my visit, jazz music culled
from his vast CD collection hummed quietly in the background. Several works in
progress were propped up on the walls, on which hung signs that read: “No
Photos.” (He made an exception for this article.) During our interview, Watts
spoke with laconic language and elegant metaphors that delighted in furtive
indirection rather than straightforward explication. Watts’s artworks are
charged with their maker’s enigmatic tendencies. Animated by African spiritual
traditions, mysticism and metaphysical cosmologies, his paintings — large
canvases and wood panels that hover between figuration, abstraction and collage
— are dense with unknown elements. At his studio, he spoke of mixing pigments
with a “magic potion” of ingredients that he wouldn’t name to create a color he
calls “Watts blue.” The sequences of numbers on some of his canvases are “codes”
that must be cracked. “Maybe one day people will know,” he said teasingly. “But
not today.” Several of Watts’s paintings are on view through Dec. 21 at Karma
Gallery, in New York, a solo exhibition focused on his work from the 1990s, the
decade that set his career in motion.
The gallery has also published a 570-page
monograph to accompany the show — the first extensive book on Watts’s work.
Concurrently, at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, N.H., several of
Watts’s paintings are on view in the show “Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ouattara
Watts: A Distant Conversation” (through Feb. 23, 2025). The two became fast
friends and creative interlocutors after they met at a gallery opening in Paris
in the 1980s.
An abstract painting features shapes and multiple shades of blue. “Spiritual Gangster 02,” 2023, in the exhibition “Ouattara Watts: ’90s Paintings” at Karma Gallery. An abstract painting features a blue character in its top right corner.
Watts’s “Spiritual Gangster 06,” 2023, at Karma Gallery
The two shows are golden opportunities for
engagement with the work of an artist who has been seminal but somehow
overlooked despite his impressive exhibition history. In 1993, he was included
in an show of Ivorian and Senegalese artists at the Venice Biennale. In 2002,
his paintings were shown in “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation
Movements in Africa, 1945-1994,” curated by Okwui Enwezor at what is now MoMA
PS1. The New York Times critic Roberta Smith called it “one of those rare
occasions when the usually hyperbolic term ‘landmark exhibition’ is not an
overstatement.” That same year, Watts’s work appeared in Documenta XI, another
Enwezor production famous for its engagements with topics of postcolonial
globalization. Still, if Watts’s name doesn’t ring bells, it is because he has
been somewhat guarded from the hustle and bustle of the art world. After the
early decades of his career, he took on fewer shows. He was, he said, “taking a
break from galleries, but never from working in the studio.” When painting, he
explained, “every step I make has got to be a real one.” Watts, who is 67, was
born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. His family is from Korhogo, a small city in the
north, where people continue to practice centuries-old religious traditions.
There, Watts developed a close relationship with one of his great-uncles, a
shaman. “He always said to me, ‘You know what? You cannot be an artist only for
your tribe or your village. No, you are an artist because the artist is
connected to the cosmos.’”
Ouattara Watts and Jean-Michel Basquiat next to
each other. Ouattara Watts and Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1988. The two became fast
friends after they met at a gallery opening in Paris that year...Mark
Sink, via Currier Museum of Art In his paintings.
Watts undertakes this cosmic
search using a lexicon of imagery and iconography culled from African spiritual
traditions Often, these appear alongside numbers and mathematical symbols,
which, for Watts, are representations of the universe and its science. Many of
his pieces also incorporate three-dimensional objects — animal horns, small
sculptures, photographs and textiles. In early paintings like “OZB” (1993),
Amharic script swirls above Albert Einstein’s book “Relativity: The Special and
General Theory,” a copy of which is affixed to the canvas. Elsewhere, in works
like “Vertigo #2” (2011), which was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, spiral
forms evoke the cosmogony of the Dogon, who are Indigenous people in Mali. In
“Sacred Painting” (1990), which is on view at Karma, an insulated electric wire
clipped to the panel pays tribute to Shango, the Yoruba deity of lightning. “All
of Africa is influential in my work,” Watts said, reflecting on the bricolage of
cultures and countries that appear in his paintings. “My spirituality does not
come from one place. It is not just Cote d’Ivoire or Nigeria or Senegal. It is
Africa.”
Image Four paintings on a wall that stands in front of a bench. From
left, Ouattara Watts’s ”Beyond Life,” 1990; Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Procession,”
1986; Watts’s “Intercessor #0,” 1989; and Watts’s “Botanique,” 2004, at the
Currier Museum of Art.Credit...Morgan Karanasios/Currier Museum of Art These
days, Watts travels throughout Africa regularly. But he has lived off the
continent for most of his life and calls himself a “citizen of the world.” (This
phrase is emblazoned on a ceiling beam in his studio.) In 1977, he left the
Ivory Coast for Paris, where he studied painting at the École Nationale
Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. There, he was captivated by French surrealism and
modernism, echoes of which come to life in his paintings.
In 1988, Watts met Basquiat, who, impressed by his work, persuaded
him to move to New York, where Basquiat believed broader horizons were possible
for artists. After a short time in the city, Watts had become embedded in its
artist circles, befriending the likes of George Condo, David Hammons and
Francesco Clemente. He grew hooked on the city and has remained here ever since.
Ouattara Watts rests his arms on a brown surface and looks downward. When painting, Watts said, “every step I make has got to be a real one.”Elijah Mogoli for The New York Times
Though Watts has been keeping
a low profile in New York, in recent years his tempo has shifted into a higher
gear. Since 2018, he has had shows in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Dakar and
his hometown, Abidjan. He also participated in the 2021 Gwangju Biennale and the
2024 Shanghai Biennale. Though the cadence of his shows has grown more rapid,
the work is still pure Watts. “He’s one of those artists who has managed to be
consistent throughout five decades of work. But also, the work has never stopped
moving and becoming more complex,” said Lorenzo Fusi, who curated the show at
the Currier Museum of Art. Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, a curator at the Museum of
Modern Art, has been following Watts for years. “He’s a brilliant painter, but
he’s understated,” Nzewi said. “We typically only think about artists who make a
lot of noise but he’s an introvert, he has a very quiet charisma.” At the same
time, he noted, Watts is “finding his true position as a painter of merit on a
global stage.” The early works at Karma are mostly rendered on wood panels and
have a coherent palette of earthy browns, yellows and greens. The show at
Currier — which includes recent and older work — tilts on a different axis, one
of playful line and effulgent color. (His vibrant blues and reds are not unlike
Basquiat’s.) Watts’s visual language has always been abstract, but in the past
decade, his paintings have been venturing further. “Spiritual Gangster 06”
(2023), for example, seems to live in a kind of dream space of layered pastel
hues and unmoored abstract symbols. Though his stylistic sensibilities have
shifted over time, Watts’s idiosyncratic technique has remained consistent. He
typically works on the floor, à la Pollock, sometimes leaving footprints on the
canvas. He then hauls the paintings to the wall to observe and complete them.
Ouattara Watts stands in front of a large canvas. Watts’s said his
creative process is at once “very physical” and shot through with spiritual
intensity. “I go somewhere that I don’t control,” he said.
Credit...Elijah Mogoli
for The New York Times
Watts, who likens his improvisatory process to jazz,
always plays music while he works. His favorites include Fela Kuti, Bob Dylan
and Thelonious Monk. For Watts, these artists are essential to his process:
“They give me energy to think,” he said. “I drink all of it up. And after I
drink that light, I give it to others.” Often, he uses a paint-coated glove
instead of a brush, leaving a thick, rough texture behind. Organic materials
like shredded leaves and paper, which Watts mixes into his paint, lend
additional density and friction to his surfaces. His creative process, he said,
is at once “very physical” and shot through with spiritual intensity: He
describes entering a kind of trance state when he paints, recalling the
shamanistic rituals he grew up observing. “I go somewhere that I don’t control,”
he said. Standing in front of one of his paintings, Watts gestured toward it,
then to his own chest and said, without elaboration or hesitation: “We are
intercessors.”
