Belonging to a series of fifteen large-scale paintings first shown together at Vladimir Restoin Roitfield’s 2012 exhibition Ouattara Watts: Vertigo in New York, Vertigo #11 is an exploration into life’s encounters, expressed through Ouattara Watts’s system of symbols, found objects and traditional painterly methods. “For me, all of life is a series of encounters,” said Watts at the opening of the exhibition. “From life, to art, to love, to work. This exhibition expresses my view of these encounters through my painting. If there is no shock and no meeting, there is no vertigo.” (Ouattara Watts quoted in: Virginia VanZanten, “Artist Ouattara Watts Returns to New York,” W Magazine, 2 June 2012, online) Ivory-Coast born, Paris educated and New-York based, Watts’s visual lexicon is cosmopolitan and multi-cultural, drawing on the wide range of cultures and aesthetics to construct an expansive and complex visual universe of codes and symbols. Watts’s works are housed in important public collections including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where Vertigo #2 from the present series was acquired in 2021.

Watts was born in 1957 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The artistic scene throughout the 1970s and 80s in the Ivory Coast was in pedagogical revolt, having become independent from France in 1960 and caught in a moment of political instability and economic expansion. Led by painter Jacques Yankel, artists turned to materials such as sand, clay and other non-European, traditional materials as a means of rejecting the Eurocentricity of the artistic training and searched for a new, post-colonial African identity, growing into the Vohou-Vohou movement: A movement about rupture, renouncing figuration and forging a path towards abstraction using materials from the immediate environment. Watts, having moved to Paris to study at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1977, forged a different path from the Vohou-Vohou artists, participating in their dialogues on abstraction whilst also synthesizing his longstanding interests in Egyptology and ancient Greece, the visual culture and knowledge systems of his West African home, and the modernism and Surrealism he encountered in France.

Despite receiving private patronage from significant collectors such as Claude Picasso and Andrée Putman, and contemporaries such as Brice Marden, Watts struggled to find engagement and acknowledgement in Paris throughout the 1980s. It was amidst these difficult years that in January 1988 he met Jean-Michel Basquiat, who had visited the Ivory Coast two years prior and took an immediate interest in Watts’s work. The two first met in Paris during an opening of Basquiat’s show, when Basquiat famously left his own private view to visit Watts’s studio. Watts recalled, “He went crazy for my work and bought a painting there and then. He was born in the US, I was born in Africa, and Jean had always searched for Africa in his work. It was a chance encounter, he needed someone like me and I needed someone like him.” (Ouattara Watts quoted in: Clotilde Scordia, “Ouattara Watts: Mystical Storyteller,” Happening, 5 September 2015, online) It was Basquiat who convinced Watts to move to New York later that year, where Watts still lives and works.

Back in the Ivory Coast, Watts grew up in a family with a syncretic approach to spiritualism, incorporating elements of many different religions – Catholicism, Islam, Sufi mysticism – into a core of African religions. In France, he was inspired by the lyrical abstraction of Kazimir Malevich and the meditative quality of Mark Rothko’s paintings, which prompted his deep exploration into a spiritual language which transcended religious and cultural grounds. In New York, these investigations culminated into an explosion of symbolic imagery, which has since then become signature elements of his work. The colourful swirls and cycloptic faces on the surface of the present work are among Watts’s painterly lexicon. Painted on top of a green fabric badge are the words “For a prosperous nation vote Art,” reflecting his personal beliefs on the role of painting: “For me, painting must heal. Painting is there to try understand the world. There are often codes, translating to strong moments in my life, my close relationships, an influence in the everyday.” (Ouattara Watts quoted in: Ibid)

Growing up with in the bustling metropolis of Abidjan and living in three different continents, Watts’s experience is one of true cosmopolitanism. Layering cryptic forms and imagery around the expansive canvas, Watts describes his painterly process as a dance and ritual, the final composition shrouded in mysticism as the viewer navigates the dizzying terrain of Vertigo #11. Allusive and associative, Watts’s practice engages with the universal and cosmological, inviting the viewers to engage not with a culture or religion, but with the underlying spirituality of all existence.