The Cécile Fakhoury Gallery presents the solo exhibition of the Ivorian and American artist Ouattara Watts entitled “Ouattara Watts in Dakar“. This exhibition will run until March 11, 2023 and marks the third collaboration between the artist and the gallery after two other exhibitions in Abidjan in 2018 and at FIAC in Paris in 2019.
The exhibition “Ouattara Watts in Dakar” reflects the artist’s deep and personal relationship with the city of Dakar. This city has inspired him for its culture, its musicians, its languages and its ocean. The works presented in the exhibition were conceived especially for the occasion and everything in them resonates with Dakar, notably with the color palette that includes the orange pinks so characteristic of the artist as well as the deep blues and sub-Saharan skies.
The format of the paintings also transports us to Dakar. The artist’s monumental frescoes give way to more condensed formats. Visual experiments, such as collages of images, and the black holes of gray matter spread by the fingers, dialogue with the idea of a matrix linking two distinct worlds together.
To understand Watts’ works, it is necessary to step back, take in the whole and decipher the series of cryptic symbols that have accompanied the artist throughout his career. The works of Ouattara Watts are spaces of projection that are charged with a non-explicit meaning to be discovered gradually to give shape to a narrative.t
The exhibition “Ouattara Watts in Dakar” is a unique opportunity to discover the works of the artist and to understand his personal relationship with the city of Dakar.
