Ouattara Watts

Musical notes, eyes, nodes, arrows, numerals, alien vessels, African masks, and modernist sculpture—these are among the vast range of symbols that recur throughout Ouattara Watts’s paintings. His densely layered compositions reflect his omnivorous approach to the histories of painting and visual expression more broadly: a single canvas by the artist, its surface composed of textiles and other materials, may shift between gestural abstraction, color fields, and figuration. Watts’s attention to materiality dates to 1977, when he arrived in Paris to study art from Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire and began painting on tarpaulin. By the time he moved to New York City in 1988, he was already incorporating found objects and fabrics into his compositions. Across New Paintings, Watts sets his enigmatic signs among patterned fabric, papier-mâché relief, and paint-spattered floor cloths, holding the graphic and the gestural in tension.

Watts often finds the beginnings of his paintings in the patterns of the textiles he collects from around the world. “It has got to talk to me,” he has said. “Sometimes, when I see a certain textile . . . I can see the painting.” In certain works, Watts integrates fabric into the ground itself. He extended the flat schema of a textile’s patterning into the composition of Untitled (2026), dividing the canvas into stacked registers of black-and-gold floral fabric, painted along one edge with a scalloped border. Elsewhere, he allows the cloth to set the palette and the motifs of the composition. Watts laid a square of Dutch wax fabric across the upper-left quadrant of My Favorite Thing (2026), echoing the swatch’s rosettes in the sky-blue forms he painted over and around it.

Other works start with materials from the studio itself. Assorted textiles line the walls of his Brooklyn atelier, and drop cloths covering the floor accumulate layers of spilled and splattered paint. Watts repurposed an orange drop cloth, stained with both the residue of earlier paintings and his own footprints, for the ground of Intercessor A to Z (2025–26). Atop it, scattered marks and symbols depict, among other imagery, a house, a tree, and a pattern-like motif abstracting the Egyptian pyramids into a row of triangles. The artist also builds up surfaces from papier-mâché mixed with leaves, as in The Knowledge Transmitter #1 (2025–26), where the composite spans the canvas in two fields of coarse, earthen strokes. Between them he set a swatch of cotton—painted with a red S—alongside his own photograph of a carved-wood African mask, not unlike those he keeps throughout his studio.

Watts’s iconography spans continents and centuries as he draws connections between distant cultures. “In a single body of work,” writes curator Lawrence Rinder, “he may incorporate Senufo and Bambara standing figures, Dogon symbols, cosmological diagrams and numerological charts, Ethiopian Amharic script, a grand piano, antique European lace . . .” In several paintings here, including The Knowledge Transmitter #2 (2025), a stacked pillar recalls both Constantin Brâncuși’s Endless Column, whose repeated forms suggest infinite extension, and the hand-carved wood ladders regarded in Dogon cosmology as links between earthly and ancestral realms. In The Knowledge Transmitter #3 (2026), Watts moved beyond the spiritual and into outer space: two extraterrestrial figures stand at either side of the monumental canvas like sentinels, flanking a spaceship that hovers against a ground of gold damask.

In his studio, Watts works fluidly between canvases, and music plays continuously. The artist revisits elements in each painting as new possibilities emerge in a process that draws on the improvisation of jazz. My Favorite Thing is his tribute to saxophonist John Coltrane, who would have turned one hundred this year. Just as the musician returned to the same tunes over years of performance, reharmonizing them through a system known as the “Coltrane matrix,” Watts considers no painting finished. Each work remains open-ended, reflecting both the evolving nature of his practice and the longer history of human civilization, as he recasts ancient signs, ornate textiles, and other materials in new configurations.