Ouattara Watts @ the Hecksher Museum of Art in Huntington l from April 19th to June 22nd

Ouattara Watts
- Lilly Wei
 
"For Lily" was an exhilarating show, an epic in exuberant paint that was both a consolidation and breakthrough for New York-based, Paris-trained, Abidjan-born artist Ouattara Watts. A grand summation of past endeavors, it was threaded, as always in his work, with references to Africa, Europe and America, and it offered a gorgeous mapping of Watts' diverse cultural upbringing . Jazz, hip-hop, other aspects of American popular culture, Baudelaire, shamanism, Afro-Caribbean rituals, Christian imagery, and graffiti-like signs, words, and numbers infiltrate his bold, richly colored symbolist canvases, with their collaged compositions (photographs, maps, tapestry scraps), disjunctive rhythms, and mythic themes.
 Watts' brand of Neo-Expressionism has always been compared to that of Julian Schnabel and, more particularly, to Jean-Michel Basquiat's. In fact it is distinctly his own. The artist's blend of seriousness, play, surrealist inclinations, and retro splendor is in full bloom in these remarkably dense recent canvasses. Even when the field is essentially empty, as in Farafina (2007), which is interrupted only by numbers that replicate those given to Africans and Jews in death camps, a new psychological and formal intensity is evident.
 One standout here was So What (2007), dominated by few irregular forms, several figures - a shamanistic shape, a yellow de Chirico mannequin's head, and ribbons of numbers. Colors are limited to the primaries (plus blacks and whites), but what colors they are: a velvety crimson, a blue like the sky just before night falls. Sun Ra (2007), with its calligraphic flashes of black traversing the surface and echoing the bright red orange streaks and blue globes that shift to constellated sky, is a knockout, as are Le Fleurs du mal I and II (both 2007). Vibrant with joie de vivre despite their often disturbing content, these are Watts' masterpieces to date.