African Soldiers, 2019

Ouattara Watts

"My vision is not bound to a country or a continent; it extends beyond borders and all that can be found on a map. While I use identifiable pictorial elements to be better understood, this project is nevertheless about something much wider. I am painting the Cosmos." Ouattara Watts

Through vibrant colors, dynamic shapes, and hypnotic signs and symbols, Ouattara Watts explores the spiritual bonds that transcend geography and nationality.

By merging found objects, photographs, and raw materials, Watts' paintings invoke the artist's multicultural identity and offer various levels of readings, socially and historically. With lyricism and wit, Watts conjures imaginary worlds and magical visions, both urban and ancestral, to contemplate the metaphysical relationships between beings.

At the end of the 70s, Ouattara Watts moves from Abidjan to Paris in order to study at the Fine Arts School of Paris. In January 1988, he meets Jean-Michel Basquiat. Impressed by his work, Basquiat takes Watts with him to New York. Moved by a common interest in African culture, philosophy and spirituality, they will travel and work together until the death of Basquiat in August 1988. This loss acts as a revival in Ouattara Watts' work, as he abandons his first artistic researches and develops a new corpus of works in their own rights. The canvases, with ever growing sizes, are covered by cryptic ideograms, by symbols from a forgotten religion, by complex equations.

Since the beginning of his carrier, Ouattara Watts' work has been displayed in prominent international ...

Galerie Cécile Fakhoury

Galerie Cécile Fakhoury opened its doors in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in September 2012. In May, 2018 the gallery inaugurated second space in Dakar, Senegal and a showroom in Paris in France.

The gallery aims at promoting contemporary art in Africa. It offers visibility to creativity and contemporary artistic diversity in Africa through its programming of solo shows and group exhibitions, participation in international art fairs and biennales, and through its collaboration with foreign galleries.

Strongly rooted in their respective identities and stories, the artists represented by the gallery distinguish themselves through the use of a language that abolishes barriers and rejects geographical stigmatisation. Observers of a world they live in, these artists take an enlightened and critical look at our society. The diversity of their aesthetic gestures, committed positions to grab the complexity of History, participates in the writing of a living memory and asks us to reconsider our own relation to the world.


Cécile Fakhoury Abidjan
Boulevard Latrille
Between Carrefour de la Vie and le carrefour de la RTI
Between Sodemi and Immeuble Carbone
Cocody
Abidjan - Ivory Coast

Cécile Fakhoury Dakar
Rue Carnot x Béranger Féraud
Behind, Hotel Pullman
Plateau
BP 23402
Dakar - Sénégal