Quattara at 65 Thompson - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

One of the greatest in quantity surprising things about this impressive material part of work by Ouattara is its faculty of perception of familiarity. Despite the artist's "exotic" Ivory Coast origin and the fact that the paintings are filled with respects to African culture and history, his relate tos and approach are hardly far from those of culture-crossing artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Francesco Clemente What is different is the direction of influence, for here we have an African artist whose native sensibility has been inflected with an acute awareness of Western postmodernism. Stressing flattened space, collage uncompounded bodys and a freewheeling mix of figures and emblems, Ouattara suggests that the distance between contemporary African and Western consciousness is not in like manner great as it might seem

This exhibit was dominated by a place of very large works which unfold across the wall like tapestries. They are pepper with reminders of colonialism (a burlap coffee sack, a scrap of paper advertising European cigarettes), ritual representatives (Christian crosses, an expanse of handprints, the Afro-Caribbean deity Mami Wata depicted as a woman with a snake coiling around her neck) and political relations (a crossshaped field of black-skinned figures arranged as if packed together in a slave ship, names and dates alluding to the history of African independence). These diverse images collide against one another across moulds that may suggest mud floors or the bright fulvouss and blues of dyed fabric.

Often the compositions are anchored by the agency of a powerful central image. In individual work, a golden skeleton playing a tympanum is surrounded by a field of footprints suggesting the vestiges of a ritual dance. In another, an elongated, double - headed leopard stretches across the bottom half of the canvas, while images drawn from human agriculture - a cross, a plant of family photographs, representations of African deities - float above. undaunted simple outlines define the forms, and paint is applied with a casual, almost careless touch.

In other words, the compositions mirror an associative, expressive mode that we have learned to read as a reflection of the fragmented quality of contemporary agriculture In Ouattara's works, the myth of a holistic African consciousness gives way to a hybrid, disjunctive reality.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group