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OKWl I ENWKZOR 
If painting, as Peter Sclijcldahl rcccntl\ intimated, 
was 'burnt to a crisp b\ the 
phcnomenolugical stare.' then OK aw 
cqualls assume that the pictorial dilettantism 
that overhangs the New York art world like 
smog, does nothing to assuage the H u s t - 
ings of man] gallen goers ova the state ol 
painting And as pamtingsdeath knell eeaselessh 
tolls, the new s that it no longer salisi ,es 
as it used lo gets older and older. 
How eould it not. when the paintings lornul 
precepts remain so much at odds « hi) the Iin 
tic siecle's troubled multiculiui al mood. Vet 
despite this multicultural mood one Imd- n 
disturbing that it remains a truism thai ik 
contemporaiA art world. especialK m few 
^ ork. ,s not quite as rc.eptixe 10 a niultipL
view of the medium of painting as it should. 
These thoughts come to me as I stand staring 
in awe and wonder at the aggressive monuments 
that Ouattara, an artist from Ivory 
Coast, has installed at the Gagosian gallery at 
65 Thompson. 
Yes, painting can still satisfy, even for this 
writer who finds its quarrels with form, technique 
and the picture plane too boring to 
bear. What distinguishes Ouattara though 
from many of his contemporaries (Francesco 
Clemente, El Hadji Sy 
or Julian Schnabel for * 
example) is his wildly 
idiosyncratic style. 
Whereas the work of the 
artists mentioned 
above seem fully anchored 
in a calm sea 
of recognisable aesthetic 
devices, 
Ouattara's totemic 
figures and accumulations 
of varied cultural 
symbols undermine 
these devices in 
a manner that places 
his work at the edge of 
true innovation. 
In his current series of 
paintings what 
Ouattara has initiated 
is a thoroughly revised 
contemporary attitude 
towards representation. 
His disquieting 
paintings and assemblages 
are not so much 
paintings as much as 
they are performative 
sites where ritualistic intent, 
technique and form 
are seamlessly worked 
to create a charged discursive, 
aesthetic, and 
spiritual mood. 
Cumulatively looked at, 
Ouattara's work at a distance 
evinces the attitude 
of eighties' neo-expressionism 
laden with sweeping macho gestures, 
size and lots of lumpy paint to convince 
viewers of its presence and importance. 
But here, something else is at work. I 
am inclined to see his outsized frames less as 
paintings, and more as painted objects; rough 
hewn carriers of multiple cultural signs (Nok, 
Dogon, Amharic, Egyptian, Senufo) relocated 
from their original domicile to this 
almost incongruous space to produce new 
meanings. The awkwardness of the long, 
narrow gallery was not particularly advantageous 
to the task the artist might have wished 
for his works to perform. Yet their compressed 
energy make their aura even more 
palpably evident. 
Constructed to be experienced panoramically, 
from left to right and vice versa the muralsized 
paintings bear a mark of tension in the 
way images of violence, consumerism, popculture 
history, religion and politics have 
been mobilised. 
Dark Star (1994), a painting consisting entirety 
of footprints and handprints occasionally 
punctuated by Nike 
sneaker logo prints, is a frenzied act of joie de 
vivre that suggests more a mood of anxiety 
than joy. The sly marriage of consumer culture 
with images of death (an olive skeleton 
beating on a drum and skulls floating on the 
painting's surface ) is no happy accident. 
Unfitted (1993-94) an unsettling work painted 
a vivid lemony yellow, employs as its central 
character an elliptical-shaped diagram of a 
slave ship's interior packed with massed 
shadowy, dark brown figures. A coffee bean 
sack attached to the upper left corner of the 
painting vividly delineates the boundaries 
between capital, labour and commodity (human 
and otherwise). 
1 t 
But just as it seemed that the exhibition might 
veer off kilter into the kind of didacticism 
that have come to unsettle viewers, Ouattara 
balances his grave ruminations on the condition 
of our body politic with a celebration of 
Narrativity belies Hip-Hop, 
Jazz, Makoussa's schematic 
emotional pull, which will duly 
satisfy those who share in the 
pop-cultural emblems that celebrate 
the vivacity of the cross- 
Atlantic exchanges between African 
diasporic populations and 
the continent; from Kingston to 
Brixton, Harlem to Lagos, Paris 
to Dakar. Placing end to end in 
two horizontal bands album 
covers by 
F e I a , 
B o b 
Marley, 
A r e t h a 
Franklin, 
M a n u 
Dibango, 
Salif Keita, 
Q u e e n 
Latifa. The Rolling Stones, 
John Coltrane, etc. Hip Hop, 
Jazz, Makoussa is a veritable 
precis of twentieth century 
popular music and youth culture, 
hipness as we have come 
to know it. 
Exchange obviously, carries the 
normative value of some form 
of transaction. In the works 
shown here, its currency is that 
of an African cosmology. They 
come in the form of quotations 
taken from Amharic text, 
Egyptian Ankhs, colonial photography 
and architectural fragments: 
adobe walls and steles 
found on the facades of 
Mosques and granaries throughout Africa. 
The insistent pressure of political content (a 
new direction, I imagine in Ouattara's formidable 
Oeuvre) rather than repel draws viewers 
closer to the paintings, whereupon subtle 
incidents and quotidian elements reveal the 
artist's wry humour. Though Ouattara has 
been absent on the New York Gallery scene 
for almost five years, his return shows him a 
really fine form. GR 
71