2024KJ Abudu

Refusing the reductive philosophical binaries that have long shaped the parameters of modern Western thought—notably the fraught distinction between the universal and the particular—the Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire once wrote: “I’m not going to confine myself to some narrow particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a disembodied universalism . . . I have a different idea of a universal . . . [one] rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.”1 It is not difficult to find resonances of Césaire’s anti-colonial proclamation in the work of Ouattara Watts, for whom the cosmos and its defining mystical energies are the objects of deep study and reverence. A quick look through Watts’s expansive oeuvre makes evident that his “universal” metaphysical explorations remain grounded in and animated by multiple (historically denigrated) “particulars”—the poetics, linguistics, and cosmologies coming from various parts of the African continent and its globally entangled diasporas. For these diverse African knowledge systems, which precede and exceed the epistemic orders of colonial modernity, Enlightenment separations between the aesthetic and the scientific, the visual and the sonic, the secular and the sacred, and spirit and matter, are subtly revealed as repressive metaphysical farces. Taking his cues from these alternative ways of knowing, Watts incorporates textiles, pulp, archival images, cosmograms, mathematical equations, and abstracted design elements into his compositions. The resulting works, which buzz with chromatic intensity, elude distinctions between painted image, sculpted object, and theorized concept. His equally lyrical and committed epistemic recuperation of “what Africans have inside” shows up at multiple points in our conversation as we navigate the politics of spirituality, fractal geometries, jazz improvisation, and modern art history, among other things.

KJ ABUDU

In an interview with Okwui Enwezor in Nka journal in 1995, you ground your practice in spirituality, saying your work is about “energy” and “communicating with the invisible.”2 Have you always characterized your practice this way? And could you speak more about the function of this explicit metaphysical orientation? Does it serve the purpose of divination? Ancestral communion? Cosmic meditation? Psychic/somatic healing?

OUATTARA WATTS

Yes, I would say that it’s cosmic. Everything comes from my education. I became a painter because of my education—how I grew up. Also space, the savanna landscape, its wide horizons. I spent a lot of time in that landscape, and that for me was a cosmic education. This vision of open space in relation to the cosmos is also something I learned from my grandparents and shamans.

KJ ABUDU

Beautiful. This concern with spirit has long been a hallmark of black and African aesthetics and philosophy. Some would also say that this “spirit,” as conceived by multiple African indigenous systems of thought, both precedes and exceeds the abstract logics—that is, the colonial metaphysics—that undergird the present hegemony of Western capitalist modernity. I would further propose that this “spirit” historically and continually sustains the lyrical disruptions and social poesis of what we might call, for lack of a better term, “blackness” (in the non-essentialist sense). I wonder, if at all, you view the implications of your spiritual impulses in this way? In other words, what for you is the relationship between spirituality and politics?

OUATTARA WATTS

One thing is spirituality and another thing is politics. Spirituality is the way I live my life—I am a deeply spiritual person. It brought me to painting, it’s helped me a lot in my work. I think politics is a game. That doesn’t mean I’m not interested in politics, but the biggest thing for me is spirituality.

KJ ABUDU

It’s a kind of poetics of living that allows you to zoom out—a cultivation of a mode of consciousness that enables a view of the whole, as it were.

OUATTARA WATTS

Exactly.

KJ ABUDU

Your work doesn’t fit into linear, monocultural, or nationalist art historical genealogies, and for good reason. You’ve spoken of being influenced by mid-twentieth-century Euro-American artistic movements such as Abstract Expressionism. When did you come into contact with such painting styles? Further, which artists from the movement inspired you, and why?

OUATTARA WATTS

You know, when I was young, I saw work by Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani . . . all these artists who took inspiration from African culture, African sculpture. I saw the work and thought: this is my family. I need to be a part of this group of people. I first encountered Abstract Expressionism and so on while living in Paris, going to museums. But I don’t feel like one person in particular influenced me. I feel like I’m part of a family of artists. I feel close to the ideas of Jackson Pollock, the way he works with space. Jean-Michel Basquiat, of course. Brice Marden. Mark Rothko—looking at his work is like meditation. When I paint, I feel this connection with them. It’s like communicating with the cosmos—it is all a feeling of being part of this family. Also artists from Nepal or Africa or Native Americans—the way they look at the sky, or for me, it’s—

KJ ABUDU

Earth, matter, spirit . . .

OUATTARA WATTS

Exactly. For me, it’s very important.

KJ ABUDU

So it’s not a matter of “influence” in the sense of seeing what can be appropriated and reworked by these bygone art historical movements. But rather, about understanding the spiritual and formal resonances that were always already present between what you were and are making and what these artists had made.

OUATTARA WATTS

Absolutely. I had to build my own vision, my own creations, but I also feel like part of a family. It’s like being a musician: you’re playing together, you improvise—

KJ ABUDU

It’s like a jazz ensemble.

OUATTARA WATTS

Exactly. For me, it’s the same thing.

KJ ABUDU

That’s wonderful. Recently, I’ve been deeply immersed in the work of the philosopher R. A. Judy, whose rigorous thinking complements your visual practice in many ways. Similarly, Judy invokes a lineage of thinkers and musicians, from W. E. B. Du Bois, and Bessie Jones and the Davises, to Hortense Spillers and Nahum Chandler. He conceives of this lineage of black (American) cultural and intellectual production as a large ensemble with each member improvising on the same standard—a standard he playfully titles “Being Artistically Rhythmical in the Interstices of Capitalist Modernity.”3 I think that’s related to what you’re getting at as well: that all these artists are riffing on the same standard and you are a participant in that social ensemble.

OUATTARA WATTS

Absolutely. Even when you look at Greek sculpture, sometimes you don’t even know the name of the sculptor, but he talks to you, the work speaks to you.

KJ ABUDU

I even see it in your studio—the geographic and historical range of cultural objects and references. With one glance, I’ve spotted Ibeji sculptures, a postcard image of a tipi, Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy, and a silk swatch featuring a depiction of a Buddha goddess.

OUATTARA WATTS

Absolutely. I like to mix things, I like to put things together and then build something new, for something new to live.

KJ ABUDU

This syncretic tendency drives your practice forward. It appears in your work that you are thinking of and drawing from the totality of cultural production by the human species. Some may use the term “universal” to characterize this impulse—a very complicated and loaded notion—but I specifically use it to evoke the incalculable entanglements and relations (which may or may not be hierarchical) that constitute the irreducible heterogeneity of dynamically produced cultural particularities.

OUATTARA WATTS

Listen, for me, everybody’s the same. People say all human beings come from Africa. In front of death, everybody is the same. Of course, inside of each culture there is something different, that’s what makes it rich—an accumulation of knowledge.

KJ ABUDU

One could say everyone belongs to a “universal family of culture,” but I think your work is more nuanced in that it is very much a reflection of who you are. Everyone comes from somewhere, after all.

OUATTARA WATTS

Absolutely, everybody comes from somewhere. There are particularities—different cultures, different experiences—of course, but a human being is a human being, that’s my philosophy.

KJ ABUDU

On a related note, I’ve observed that a maelstrom of African forms and linguistic systems from all over the continent are consistently cited in your canvases. Abstracted Senufo sculptural geometries appear alongside screenprinted Nok and Benin masks, and next to curling lines of Amharic script. I wonder if, given the transposition of these indigenous forms and their associative cosmological patterns onto the modern Western tradition of painting, you view your works in conversation with a global lineage of postcolonial modernisms and calligraphic abstraction (wherein such cross-cultural negotiations are known to occur)? I’m thinking of artists as diverse as Lee Ufan, Wosene Kosrof, Ibraham El Salahi, Mohammed Melehi, and Rachid Koraichi, for example.

OUATTARA WATTS

Well, it was a first—to have so many influences.

KJ ABUDU

Right, in the twentieth century, a specifically global aesthetic mode emerged by virtue of artists from multiple colonies or newly independent postcolonial states traveling to and being educated in colonial metropoles such as London and Paris. A cross-cultural migration—or creolisation, you could say—of forms and sensibilities followed, especially in painting.

OUATTARA WATTS

Yes, Picasso worked with African sculpture. Rothko for me embodies the idea of the universal. Even Cy Twombly . . . I can feel close to people like him because of that. And Jean-Michel.

KJ ABUDU

You’re definitely spot-on in identifying the colonial conditions of possibility for the emergence of artistic modernism vis-à-vis Picasso and Cubism in the early twentieth century. But I wonder whether you see yourself aligned with other modern and contemporary African artists who have similarly deconstructed and exceeded modernism’s primitivist fantasies?

OUATTARA WATTS

I think universally. For me it’s about the history of the human soul—not a history of clans, ethnic groups, artists, it’s about the human condition.

KJ ABUDU

Speaking of painting, one might say that painterly abstraction is not inherently Western. After all, what legitimate distinctions of formal quality and aesthetic intelligence might be made between the best-known canvas-stretched works of geometric abstraction in the Euro-American tradition and the finest Ewe, Ivorian, or Malian textiles? The anxious distinction that is often made by mainstream art history and museums is one between so-called “art” and “craft,” which as we know is a dubious binary that is predicated on racial and colonial epistemologies. The resonances between high Euro-modernism and non-Western craft are also not typically coincidental. For example, you’ve mentioned Pollock—he was influenced by Indigenous American art. Figures like Kenneth Noland were also looking at North African design patterns and color palettes. The list goes on and on.

OUATTARA WATTS

I don’t choose a certain textile because it is from a specific place. The textile contains messages in its weave—for me what is important is the encounter with the fabric. It has got to talk to me. Sometimes, when I see a certain textile—in a store, at a flea market, wherever—I can see the painting.

KJ ABUDU

Could you speak more about why you’ve collected them for so long and what draws you to these textiles as artistic materials?

OUATTARA WATTS

It’s the beauty, the language.

KJ ABUDU

And when did you start using them in your painting? Would you say as early as the ’80s?

OUATTARA WATTS

Yes, since the early ’80s. I have always worked with different textiles—Italian, Tibetan, African, any fabric that speaks to me.

KJ ABUDU

That’s really interesting because I feel like you’re quite literally embedding the cultural memories, messages, and life-worlds contained in these textiles into your singular, painterly compositions. Speaking of textiles, Robert Farris Thompson, who I know engaged with your work decades ago, wrote briefly about African textiles, specifically loom-woven Mande and Ivorian textiles, in his landmark book, Flash of the Spirit. He compares the off-beat distribution of color blocks across the woven textile strips to the melodic phrasing and rhythmic syncopation that characterizes many Afro-diasporic musical traditions and forms of speech.

OUATTARA WATTS

Absolutely. And then also something mathematical.

KJ ABUDU

Exactly—that’s where I was going!

OUATTARA WATTS

The fractal—it’s in African architecture, African knowledge. When I use numbers and code in my work, it’s about the fractal, which is an ancient human language.

KJ ABUDU

Have you read Ron Eglash’s African Fractals? He looks at the socio-architectural organization of towns all over the African continent, noting the algorithmic recursion of spatial patterns and geometries through multiple scales, from the domestic unit, to the compound, to the entire village.

OUATTARA WATTS

For me, the fractal is the beginning of the computer.

KJ ABUDU

Yes, exactly. Eglash elaborates a transcontinental genealogy to support this claim. He

begins by looking at the epistemic migration of binary mathematics from African divination systems, such as Ifá, to Islamic mystics, to Spanish medieval alchemists, and then to modern European mathematicians such as George Boole whose work laid the foundations of modern computer science and circuit design.

OUATTARA WATTS

Fractals are everywhere in Africa, even—

KJ ABUDU

In hair braiding, in the weave of baskets even. Returning quickly to the textiles and the rhythmic placement of the color blocks we often see in them, I’d love for you to say more about the synesthetic relay between sight and sound, color and rhythm. In other words, how do these textiles inform your approach to composition-making, and how you think about color, tone, and surface?

OUATTARA WATTS

All of this knowledge from the fractal is something that has helped me—inspired me—to make paintings. For me, painting is like music, part improvisation, part not. You’ve got to go deep. The way I work is so connected with music, so connected to dance. I don’t want people to look at my paintings just like a mathematician, even though my paintings are inspired by the sciences.

KJ ABUDU

I’m interested in what you said about mathematics, because while there is a dominant mode of mathematical reasoning that is tethered to mechanical, logocentric, procedural reasoning, as we’ve been discussing, there’s an alternative mystico-mathematical tradition that concerns itself with apprehending infinity and the divine.

OUATTARA WATTS

You’ve got to feel it. It’s not something I can teach people, it’s something you feel.

KJ ABUDU

It’s embodied.

OUATTARA WATTS

Exactly. And then you use that for your painting.

KJ ABUDU

I think about John Coltrane, for instance, and sometimes I watch archival video performances of him improvising. The same also goes for other jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk. While in their poetics of improvisation, these musicians may not be engaged in a mode of calculation in the same way a mechanical engineer might be. But I do think there is a different register of calculation going on, where, I suppose, Coltrane thinks, “I’m going to expel this much breath into my saxophone at this exact moment.” In other words, improvisation might be thought of as a series of calculated performative gestures that are intuitively formed in response to the ever-renewing present.

OUATTARA WATTS

If it’s an emotion, it’s about emotion—you cannot calculate it. You’re going to have to estimate.

KJ ABUDU

It’s an intuitive calculation.

OUATTARA WATTS

Of course. If you don’t have that instinct, stop the painting.

KJ ABUDU

But I also think that skill or that instinct that you speak of comes from decades of— Ouattara Watts Creation.

KJ ABUDU

Yes, practice, or as jazz musicians would say, “woodshedding.” Indeed, you improvise, but I feel like you’re able to improvise generatively and impactfully because you’ve been engaged in these rituals of mark-making for many decades. Even though it’s intuition, it’s a learned intuition, right?

OUATTARA WATTS

Yes. When you paint, at that moment, you’re in trance. Sometimes you don’t even know what you’re doing. Afterwards, you say, “Wow, okay.” And the work’s hard to speak to. It’s like how a painting is never finished. You paint for five, ten years, you come back, you still want to add something, you still want to go back in again.

KJ ABUDU

Would you say that it’s like you are possessed by the forces of the invisible world, by its cosmic energy?

OUATTARA WATTS

Absolutely. For me it’s absolutely a trance.

KJ ABUDU

To return to your interview with Enwezor, in reference to your investment in the robust, variegated archive of African aesthetics, you say: “I want to show and share what Africans have inside.”4 You emphasize the importance of knowing this African “inside.” I’m so intrigued by your invocation of this mysterious yet possibly transformative and expansive interiority. Would you say that this inquiry still drives your practice almost a quarter of a century later? What are some of the major things you’ve learned, visually, materially, and sonically, from absorbing the vastness of multiple African knowledges?

OUATTARA WATTS

First of all, I was born in Africa. One part of my education is from Africa, African culture—that’s one thing. Secondly, something that I think, profoundly, is that you have to absorb everything. You go in slow, take all of these cultures in, swallow . . .

KJ ABUDU

Digest.

OUATTARA WATTS

Yes, and then after, vomit it all up, like a shaman. Then you can do what you want to do— you can figure out how you work, how you relate to and differ from others. When I say, “Take it in, sit with it, and then throw it all back up,” that’s my subject. I think people today need to learn how to appreciate the painting again. They need to close their eyes and then open them up again. I think it’s going to be good for everybody.

KJ ABUDU

It’s interesting how you analogize knowledge absorption to food ingestion. In this way, you’re invoking the sort of transformation of consciousness that must occur on a deep molecular level as one encounters these heterogeneous African life-worlds. This is the sort of transformation that ought to alter one’s very constitution so as to augment the cognitive and material structure of one’s subsequent aesthetic production. We could call this a “re-rhythm[ing]” of thought.5

OUATTARA WATTS

Exactly. Look at Picasso: he did all this painting and then created a revolution with Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. This is very important.

1. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 26.

2. Okwui Enwezor, “Ouattara: Beyond Shamanism,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 2 (Spring/Summer 1995).

3. R. A. Judy, Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020), 416.

4. Ouattara Watts in Enwezor, “Ouattara: Beyond Shamanism,” 28.

5. J. Kameron Carter, The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023), 19.