Every painting by Watts is like an exclamation point. Nothing he does feels experimental or the least bit tentative. Exceptionally adept at expressing himself in paint, Watts shows us time and again: it’s this, it’s this, it’s this! The visual power of his work is balanced by the subtle nuance of his artistic sensibility. Simply put, there is something right about his paintings. There is a feeling of inevitability, of fortuitousness, of consciousness. Inevitable because they seem both otherworldly and completely familiar. Fortuitous because, despite their air of randomness, each surprising part belongs to a convincing whole. Conscious because they capture a remarkable sensation of mind and spirit in motion. Among the few other artists who share his rare combination of lucid vitality and pitch-perfect touch I would include Cy Twombly and Rosie Lee Tompkins. Perhaps Ray Johnson, too. Most artists only make pictures, like most musicians only play songs. What Watts does is more like making magic, like the stuff of the jazz and blues legends—John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Freddie King, Muddy Waters, Thelonious Monk, Sister Rosetta Tharpe—he loves so much. You can call it mojo, duende, yugen, or you can just call it art

Watts doesn’t like to dwell on it, but he descends from an illustrious family. Among his ancestors was Sekou Ouattara, leader of the Kong Empire (also known as the Ouattara or Wattara Empire) in the early eighteenth century. Perhaps relevant to Watts’s work is that this old (though not quite ancient) kingdom was a center for Islamic scholarship in which people from diverse backgrounds lived in relative harmony. Sekou Ouattara was originally from Mali where his people were called Dyula, which means “merchant” in the local language. As traders controlling the routes between the forested south and the arid Sahel, they developed a highly cosmopolitan culture, absorbing, in particular, many traditions of their animist Senufo neighbors. The Dyula also embraced the so-called Suwarian tradition, promulgated by Sheikh Al-Hajj Salim Suwari in the sixteenth century, which held that it was not a Muslim’s responsibility to convert nonbelievers, thanks to which the Kong Empire became a place of unusual religious tolerance. The Dyula’s openness to other beliefs and cultures helped to make the Kong Empire a thriving cultural and intellectual center, with trading connections throughout West Africa and as far as Europe. There is, I think, an echo of this history in Watts’s paintings, which invariably draw together references to diverse cultures, always under the umbrella of a nonsectarian spirituality. In a single body of work, he may incorporate Senufo and Bambara standing figures, Dogon symbols, cosmological diagrams and numerological charts, Ethiopian Amharic script, a grand piano, antique European lace, Brâncuși’s Endless Column, the computer code @ symbol, and a photograph of his beautiful wife, Pascale.

One especially dense painting, which includes several of these images, is titled Korhogo, the name of the town in northern Ivory Coast where Watts was born. Included among Korhogo’s many images are a number of black-and-white photographs taken by the artist at an initiation rite of the kind he underwent as a young man and through which he entered the Senufo secret society known as Poro. Although it isn’t a religion, per se, Poro embraces the idea that actions in the material world are the consequence of actions on the spiritual plane. This notion permeates Watts’s paintings: we watch the signs and symbols move about his compositions like a planchette on a Ouija board, motivated by unseen forces and spelling out a mysterious code. As it happens, Korhogo was visited by Jean-Michel Basquiat, even before he met Watts. That coincidence was one of the many things that helped to cement their brief but intense relationship. In fact, Basquiat was due to fly to Ivory Coast with Watts just before the former died. I can see why Basquiat was so interested in his new friend and his art. Watts had the artistic chops, he had the deep African legacy, he had the juju. He had all that Basquiat wanted.

While Korhogo is the cultural capital of the peace-loving Senufo people with whom Watts strongly identifies, there is an even stronger attraction to the Dogon, whose homeland is in Mali, about five hundred miles to the north. The astronomical knowledge of the Dogon is legendary, especially their awareness, even prior to gaining access to telescopes, that Sirius, the so-called Dog Star, is actually a binary or perhaps even ternary grouping. Sirius, known as Sigui to the Dogon, figures prominently in their mythology as the “navel of the sky.” In recognition of their belief that the twin star of Sigui, known as Po, orbits Sigui elliptically once every sixty years, the Dogon hold a festival every sixty years to honor the weaving of life from water and the appearance of death in the world. The Sigui festival is considered to be the longest in the world, lasting up to six years each time it is held.

Watts’s painting Sigui (2002) is an homage to the Dogon’s remarkable set of beliefs. In this work, we can see a diagram of Po’s elliptical orbit along with another trajectory which may be that of the hypothetical third star, known to the Dogon as Nyan. The presence of spirals in the painting signifies Amma, the Dogon creator god who holds the turning world in his hands. Bordering several areas of the composition are regular sequences of orange, tan, yellow, and white irregular squares. There are twenty-two of these squares, a number which is highly significant to the Dogon, symbolizing, among other things, the twenty-two members of the first mythological generation, the twenty-two joints in the resurrected god Nommo’s body, and the twenty-two squares of cloth that comprise the Dogon shaman’s tunic. The atomic symbol may be a reference to the Dogon’s conception of kize-uzi, an infinitesimally small form that paradoxically contains the essence of the entire universe.

Watts’s attraction to Dogon astronomy and cosmic mythology is linked to various paintings in which he appears to cast himself into the depths of the universe through artistic telekinesis. Take a look at the Traveler in the Cosmos series. Each of these paintings contains a strong vertical axis, like a road or ladder, or in any case a useful means of orientation in an otherwise groundless space. The most literally cosmic piece is Traveler in the Cosmos #4 (2017), a stunning evocation of the infinite firmament, inhabited by a peculiar fish-tailed figure bearing a radiant blue cross. Traveling in the Cosmos #3 (2018) centers on a shape that may be the Dogon World Egg divided in two, although it also resembles the tantric image of the Shiva lingam, a traditionally male symbol which is here given a more ambiguous dual nature by the addition of a breast-like form and slit.

Watts’s art takes us on a journey across the world and through space and time. In both his Traveler in the Cosmos and Citizen of the World series, he incorporates the now univer- sally recognized @ symbol. We might see his use of @ as recognition of the metaverse as yet another dimension to explore. Indeed, the ordinary purpose of this symbol, called “at,” is to locate us in digital space. However, I believe that the reason for his repeated inclusion of @ lies in its deep etymology. Following @ to its root, we find that the first-known use of this symbol was as a substitute for the letter a in the word amen in a fourteenth-century Bulgarian text, the Chronicle of Constantine Manasses, which tells the story of the world from its origins to the year 1081. In Watts’s art, @ signifies presentness, the first breath, the first sound, the origin of things. To be here is to be holy. Amen.