Ouattara Watts in Dakar : Online viewing room

29 November 2022 - 11 March 2023

  • G a l e r i e  C é c i l e  F a k h o u r y 

    Abidjan - Dakar - Paris 

     

     OUATTARA  WATTS 

    Ouattara Watts in Dakar 

    5 December 2022 - 11 March 2023

  • Galerie Cécile Fakhoury is pleased to present the solo exhibition by Ivorian and American artist Ouattara Watts: Ouattara Watts in Dakar from December, 5th, 2022 to March 11th, 2023. This is the third collaboration between the artist and the gallery after the major exhibition Before Looking at this Work, Listen to It in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in 2018 and the solo show at La FIAC in Paris in 2019. Galerie Cécile Fakhoury is now pleased to present the work of Ouattara Watts in Dakar, Senegal.

    • Ouattara Watts, Untitled, 2021
      Ouattara Watts, Untitled, 2021
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    • Ouattara Watts, Intercessor #5, 2022
      Ouattara Watts, Intercessor #5, 2022
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    • Ouattara Watts, Tirailleurs sénégalais #2, 2022
      Ouattara Watts, Tirailleurs sénégalais #2, 2022
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  • Ouattara Watts in Dakar, a title, like a program, that carries within it all the enthusiasm of an artist for a city. Ouattara Watts's link to Dakar is a deep and sensitive one. In his curriculum, a few Senegalese dates mark his long international career, including two years of the Biennale of Contemporary African Art - 2016, which has waited for him so long, and 2018, which finally consecrated him. The story, however, goes far beyond that.

  • Ouattara Watts in Dakar is the consecration of an intimate relationship of the artist to this beloved city of culture...

    Ouattara Watts, 

    Intercessor #1, 2022

    Mixed media on canvas

    137 x 182 cm / 54 x 72 in

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    Ouattara Watts in Dakar is the consecration of an intimate relationship of the artist to this beloved city of culture that inspires him for its poetry and the great figures of intellectuals it has grown and still hosts; for its musicians, for its languages and for its ocean.
     
    The works were conceived especially for the show, and everything in them resonates with Dakar; starting with the color palette. The orange pinks so characteristic of the artist are present and cohabit here in a new way with deep blues and sub-Saharan skies, winter storm grays and harmattan yellows.
    The format of the paintings also calls us to Dakar. Watts's monumental frescoes, selected moments of infinite cosmogonies or visual breaths of the great plains of Côte d'Ivoire, give way to more condensed formats where the world is played out in just a few square meters of canvas. In Dakar as in Watts's work, the trivial is always neighbor of the sacred.

  • THE ARTIST INTERPRETS SPACE AS RHYTHM, AS A CONTINUOUS BLOSSOMING OF ELEMENTS IN PERPETUAL TRANSFORMATION AND UTILIZES ORNAMENTAL PATTERNS TO SEW TOGETHER VARIOUS SECTIONS OF THE PICTORIAL SURFACE

     

    MASSIMO CARBON, ARTFORUM

  • On canvas, collages of borrowed images adjoin the painting in a elaborated flat tint, opaque surface that sometimes lets the...

    Ouattara Watts

    Travel in space, 2022

    Mixed media on canvas 

    137 x 122 cm / 58 x 48 in

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    On canvas, collages of borrowed images adjoin the painting in a elaborated flat tint, opaque surface that sometimes lets the canvas show through as if it were the genesis both of the image and the world (Travel in Space, 2022). The visual experiments - black holes of grey matter spread with fingers - take their meaning in dialogue with the mysterious equation at the heart of which is an ancient African statuette adorned with golden peas (Intercessor #1, 2022). The idea of a matrix emerges, dynamically connecting two distinct worlds together.

  • To make sense of Watts's works, to read beyond and after contemplating them closely, one must step back, apprehend the whole, the balance of forces in the canvases, the solids, the voids - their very particular rhythm, jazz and afro-beat syncopations cherished by the artist, as jubilant a tool for painting as is the brush.

  • Cauris, cola, Dogon column, Fibonaldi suite, logogram, Pi and Bozon repeated again and again like an incantatory formula to decipher....

    Ouattara Watts, 

    Intercessor #6, 2022

    Mixed media on canvas

    72 x 152 cm / 30 x 60 in

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    Cauris, cola, Dogon column, Fibonaldi suite, logogram, Pi and Bozon repeated again and again like an incantatory formula to decipher. The languages of Ouattara Watts are then assembled, these series of cryptic symbols that have followed the artist throughout his career; unless perhaps it is he who follows them in a liberating quest in search of the metaphysical and spiritual links that unite men beyond time and geography.

    • Ouattara Watts, Intercessor # 4, 2022
      Ouattara Watts, Intercessor # 4, 2022
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    • Ouattara Watts, Intercessor #2, 2022
      Ouattara Watts, Intercessor #2, 2022
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    • Ouattara Watts, Intercessor #7, 2022
      Ouattara Watts, Intercessor #7, 2022
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  • The works of Ouattara Watts then operate as spaces of projection. They are charged with a non-explicit meaning that one must gradually discover in order to give shape to a visual narrative in which various apprehensions of socio-historical contexts (Tirailleurs Sénégalais, 2022) and the multicultural sensibility at the heart of the artist's practice are articulated. In Dakar, then, the universalism of Ouattara Watts's painting resonates more than ever: the artist's mystical macrocosms enter into dialogue with the concrete microcosms of the city and give us the opportunity to dream of a world that is fluid and brimming with vibrant poetry.

  • Ouattara Watts Intercessor #3, 2022 Mixed media on canvas 170 x 159 cm / 67 x 62 in
    Ouattara Watts
    Intercessor #3, 2022
    Mixed media on canvas
    170 x 159 cm / 67 x 62 in
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  • Ouattara Watts was born in 1957 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Lives and works in New York. At the end of...
    Photo : James Fischetti
    Ouattara Watts was born in 1957 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. Lives and works in New York.
     At the end of the 1970s, he left Abidan and moved to Paris where he studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Shortly after graduating, he exhibited his work in galleries and became part of a dynamic Parisian art scene where he notably met Jean-Michel Basquiat. Impressed by his work, Basquiat convinced Watts to join him in New York.Driven by a common interest in African culture, philosophy and spirituality, they travelled and worked together until Basquiat's death in August 1988.

    A major figure in the visual arts of Africa and its diaspora, Ouattara Watts is regularly presented in international events such as the Dakar Biennale and the Venice Biennale. His work has been featured in landmark exhibitions such as The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 at MoMa PS1 (2001, cur. Okwui Enwezor), Body of evidence at the Smithsonian Museum for African Art in Washington (2008) or Afriques Capitales at La Villette (Paris, 2017, cur. Simon Njami). More recently, his works were presented at the Gwangju Biennale (South Korea, 2021, cur.Nathasha Ginwala & Dephne Ayas).

    In 2018, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury (Abidjan, Dakar, Paris) organised his first solo exhibition in Côte d'Ivoire since 30 years, and then presented his work at Fiac in 2019. The exhibition Before Looking at This Painting, Listen to It in Abidjan in 2018 marked his return to the heart of a vibrant West African scene in full bloom and consecrating its pioneering artists from the independence generation.
    In 2020, the MoMa acquired a work by Ouattara Watts and presented it in its walls in New York.