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Born in Côte d’Ivoire in 1957, Ouattara Watts moved to Paris in 1977, the place he studied and lived till 1988, when, on the insistence of his buddy Jean-Michel Basquiat, he relocated to New York. With its 13 large-scale works, the exhibition “Ouattara in Paris” marks a return to the artist’s previous haunts.
In his work, Watts acts as a form of go-between the Earth and the summary religious worlds he depicts. With washes of vibrant pigment, sawdust-thickened paint, and scraps of collaged African materials, the artist brings into dialogue mathematical equations and symbols, moments of neo-expressionist figuration, and iconography sampled from cultures spanning the globe. Notably charming are the artist’s floating nebulae or seedlike kinds, that are painted with extra precision and saturated coloration, their nuclei ripe for germination. They recommend a bigger inventive pressure past our understanding, as within the works of Hilma af Klint.
Whereas the exhibition’s title echoes within the milky-blue Paris: 1907, 2023, which channels Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Watts’s work successfully burst past the geographic parameters of the French capital, testifying to the intermingling of figures, locations, and occasions by means of the commerce routes connecting Africa to Europe and North America. Dakar 1966, 2018, pays homage to Senegal’s First World Competition of Negro Arts, which included French artists. In the meantime, the architecturally dense New York 1985, 2023, with arm’s-width, arched strokes of muddy, towering kinds set towards a area of mango yellow, references the Museum of Fashionable Artwork’s controversial exhibition “‘Primitivism’ in twentieth Century Artwork: Affinity of the Tribal and the Fashionable” (1984–85). In these works, Watts seems to match the assembly of creative practices with that of cosmic forces, able to producing and eclipsing worlds.
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