Focus sur / To A. Rimbaud, Ouattara Watts: Partez à la rencontre du travail d'un artiste à travers l'analyse d'une de ses œuvres

This week, we invite you to discover To A. Rimbaud, a work of the Ivorian artist Ouattara Watts.

Francis Corabœuf, director of the Gallery's showroom in Paris, offers us a personal reading of this work.

Last week we started a new period under the sign of Taurus. Just as we are nailed down and look again at the sky as an impossible place to reach, it is the strongest of the earth signs that comes to anchor us a little more for a while longer. Abidjan, Dakar, Paris, suddenly we found ourselves far away from each other. What was possible yesterday is no longer possible today, at least not in the same way. In spite of this, there is an artist who still has the power to bring us closer to the sky and the stars, and that is Ouattara Watts. In his works, the painter of the Cosmos invokes an immutable, cyclical and ancestral order. The temporality of his works is not marked by the storms of our time, they invoke the past, present and future at the same time, in the same continuum.

The painting entitled To A. Rimbaud is a door to this continuum in which are inscribed the signs that only initiated people can understand. Ouattara Watts being a painter of mystery, it is useless to look for the exact meanings of these elements. It is just necessary to appreciate the thickness of this mystery which makes the body and the consistency of the black background of this painting. The blackness of a night in which dots, stars like a constellation, come to take their place. Perhaps we will find among them Aldebaran, the red-orange eye of the Zodiac Taurus that is looking at us right now. As its name suggests, the work is dedicated to Arthur Rimbaud, the mythical teenage poet who lived the last ten years of his life in Abyssinia. In the right part of the painting, on a white pillowcase glued to the canvas, Watts writes: ETHIOPIA. Further down, one can read in dark red letters: Rimbaud. This pillowcase on which we put our head at dusk opens us to the world of sleep, dreams and nightmares, it opens to the night where everything is blurred, inverted, where anything can happen. About this double vision, the art critic Gérard Barrière wrote in 1990: "Then the eye opens. But has the eye really opened? More exactly, what does an eye open on when it opens at night? When it opens on what no eye can see? What do our eyes open on when they do not open on the visible?”.