The paintings of Ouattara Watts do serious work on the viewers who pass before them. Large-scale, textured with a range of materials, and layered in multiple languages, number systems, and symbols, Watts’s paintings cannot be apprehended quickly or in passing. As they turn your head, they make demands on you and arrest your motion, rooting you in place to look at them for a long time. The paintings demand to be read, contemplated, and meditated upon. As for how you do that—what you focus on, how you connect or piece together meanings—the artist is quite generous in leaving that part up to you.

Watts insists, unabashedly, on the universality of his paintings, which do not owe their existence to any one place, time, style, or movement. Yet their syncretism is both manifold and intense, harboring tangled combinations of elements—with specific meanings, connotations, and histories—such as scientific diagrams, long strings of numbers, photographs of African masks, Egyptian hieroglyphics, a portrait of the Lakota leader Sitting Bull, writings in Amharic, phrases in Arabic, a John Coltrane album cover (A Love Supreme, no less) for Impulse Records, actual lace doilies, painted serpents and minotaur and a hybrid cat creature, cloth sacks printed with the logo of a famous French flour mill, religious symbols, garlands and pennants, drums and other musical instruments, the deep red hats of the Senegalese tirailleurs, and the date of the Berlin conference ignominiously associated with the colonial-era “Scramble for Africa.”

There is an obvious, generative, sometimes playful, and sometimes deadly-serious tension in the artist’s mix of materials. Inevitably, you are confronted with something you do not know and cannot fully understand—like life, other people, and the natural world. You may have only a few moments of recognition or flashes of insight. Watts’s paintings are metaphysical and transcendent. They take you someplace and reward you for the time you give them. For you, as for their maker, the works are part of a spiritual practice and in that sense the experience of them is only partially visual. They demand that you look and read and decipher but also that you listen and feel and find (or invent, or imagine) the tools you need to delineate, to grasp at the edges of, the cosmic worlds that the paintings crack open.

Watts was born in Abidjan in 1957. In the precolonial era, the territories of Côte d’Ivoire had been home to many coexisting empires and kingdoms, crisscrossed for centuries by caravans, and marked by important centers of learning. Starting in the late-nineteenth century, France colonized the area by force. Watts was three when the federation known as the AOF, Afrique-Occidentale Française, or French West Africa, broke apart and eight different counties, including Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal, suddenly gained national independence. This made Abidjan, among other things, a decidedly exciting and cosmopolitan city in which to grow up, prone as it was to the topsy-turvy rhythms of local and international politics and uneven economic development. Throughout that time, older trade routes, patterns of movement, drifts in ideas and cultures, and, perhaps most importantly, the practice of key coming-of-age rituals never fully disappeared. Watts was seven when his spiritual initiation ceremony took place in Korhogo, his family’s ancestral village in the north of the country. That was when Watts began to draw and paint and make small sculptural objects. The convictions of his practice date to that moment in his childhood.

What followed, a decade later, were periods of rebellion, searching, and rigor. Watts left school in Abidjan. He moved to France and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. It was the late 1970s. He saw firsthand many of the paintings he’d previously known only from the books he had borrowed from the library of the Centre Culturel Français in Abidjan. He was interested in Surrealism, Picasso, and Modigliani. A few years ago, when I visited Watts’s studio in Bushwick and asked him what I should read to understand his work, he told me André Malraux’s Le Musée imaginaire—in French—suggesting it would be broadly useful in life.

By the time Watts was out of school and on his own in Paris, his work was already a swirl of vivid formal gestures and art-historical engagements. His color palette was earthy, his compositions sculptural, his visual vocabulary shot through with references to cultures and vernaculars from across the African continent. In 1988, Watts famously met Jean-Michel Basquiat at an opening at Galerie Yvon Lambert. It was the start of an epic if tragically short-lived friendship, which, among other things, had the effect of bringing Watts to New York, where he has lived ever since.

Watts is one of several modern and contemporary artists who have played with the idea of the painting as a portal, using elements of abstraction as openings rather than as a means of reduction or distillation. In the work of Ibrahim El-Salahi, from Sudan, Shakir Hassan Al-Said, from Iraq, and Saloua Raouda Choucair, from Lebanon, those openings are often related to Sufism, allowing for transcendence and oneness with the divine. Salahi has spoken beautifully in interviews about how his paintings have come to him as visions and in dreams, including one particular dream in which the artist was breaking the letter forms of Arabic until they became doors, and what passed through those doors were spirits, the same spirits who had appeared to the artist in his childhood. In terms of creative lineages and chosen communities, Watts is in expansive and genial company, though, admittedly, he is one of very few American artists to be experimenting in this rich terrain of painterly languages—devotional, enamored of the usefulness of everyday objects, deeply committed to beauty, open-ended, and full of possibilities.

Watts’s studio is itself a kind of dream, a space that is raw and vast and inspiring, with the words “citizen of the world” daubed casually on a crossbeam. The space is divided into three parts: a salon-style arrangement of furniture in the front for socializing; a wide-open space in the middle for the real and solitary work of painting on the floor and dancing around the canvas, often at night, with music; and storage in the back, including a treasure trove of possible, tried, and discarded materials. There are books and brushes and paint tins galore. Watts mixes all of his own colors, which, since the early 2000s, have expanded exponentially to include a wild array of purples and greens, tangerines, deep reds, a boisterous pink, and most recently, in paintings such as Sirius #1, Sirius #2, and The Shaman’s Eyes (all 2022) several different shades of an alluring oceanic blue.

The cover of a 1998 issue of Artforum is pinned to a wall just inside the front door of Watts’s studio, showing Seydou Keïta’s unforgettable portrait of a dandy in a white suit and black glasses, delicately holding a flower. That image was accompanied in the magazine by an important and memorable essay, in which the Malian writer and filmmaker Manthia Diawara explored the signs and symbols of modernity among the residents of Bamako, the joyfully cosmopolitan Bamakois, who had their portraits taken in Keïta’s studio, wedged between the city’s market, cinema, train station, and prison, in the middle of the last century. Whether deliberately or not, Keïta’s dandy is reminiscent of Persian miniatures, and his women, stretched out, fully clothed, the patterns of their dress echoed in the backdrops, belong to a crucial line of Olympias and odalisques.

Some of those connections come to mind when I try to understand what it is about Watts’s Splash of the Spirit, a painting from 2018, that I continue to find so riveting and wonderful. The painting is unmistakably joyous, with a red band across the top and a constellation of seven red orbs like planets in an unknown galaxy, attached to one another by thin red lines and thick purple blurs, below it. True to the title, there are splashes of a bluish slate gray that appear to have been thrown at the canvas from some distance. An evocation of an African mask in striking Yves Klein–blue is so crisply done that I wonder if it’s been silkscreened onto the surface.

Most of the composition sits on a central cloud of cotton-candy pink. There are drips and slashes of color all around. An ambiguous pale-orange sun (or moon) rests in the upper-right corner. Several of Watts’s compositions seem to adopt the registers of much premodern art, with horizontal bands stacked one over the other, tempting narrative connections. In this sense, a gray streak runs waywardly down the right side of Splash of the Spirit. Numbers spill along the diagonals. Five eyes—like Eyes of Horus, blue eyes, evil eyes to ward off envy—appear in a loose, casual line toward the bottom, as if they are protecting the painter, the painting, you, and me. The title obviously riffs on the late African art scholar Robert Farris Thompson’s seminal book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, published in 1984 (Thompson was a major champion of Watts’s work). But I also read the title and painting together as a mischievous and knowing homage to Helen Frankenthaler—the sheer fun of painting, playing with pools of color, flexing the language of Abstract Expressionism.

Korhogo, from 2000, is equally compelling—a painting that literally floored me the first time I saw it in person. What knocked me off balance as I passed before it was—what, exactly?—a dust-colored mountain tumbling down the middle of the composition? A mountain, I should add, with a tail. Or was it the drums? The density of numbers, squished into triangles and thick horizontal bands? Symbols and details in blue and yellow line the edges. A pink orb hovers. An image at the dead center of the painting seems to have been smudged out of legibility as if for its own protection.

There are vertical as well as horizontal registers, with several photographs slipped into the corners. One shows a chandelier, another shows mountains, another still shows a beautiful woman, lying under mosquito netting, her head propped on one arm. There are negative images and a skull. And there is another beautiful woman in the corner, a feather painted in her hair, adorned with blue dots. It’s taken me seven months of returning to an image of this painting to notice that there’s a tiny foot poking out from behind her, tucked between her torso and her inner elbow, and that the apparent excess of fabric around her waist is in fact there to tie a child, probably her own, to her back. Now I cannot help but read the painting, at least in part, as a rumination on motherhood. Arrows and curlicues point this way and that. White dots form a small grid. Blue dots fall into a vertical line. I have no idea how all of this adds up to one whole or many. The overall meanings of Watts’s paintings often hover in the near distance, just beyond my reach. The struggle to understand them, however, is never as frustrating as that may sound. On their most fundamental level, his paintings are all promise, all potential. They are a pleasure to study, inexhaustible as lessons in close looking.