The Brooklyn Rail

Is the meaningful substance of an artwork its aesthetic qualities or the circumstances surrounding its creation? Both aspects are always valid and at play, especially in painting, where one is dealing with a picture and an art object at once. In Visual Time: The Image in History (2013), a book I have carried with me for many years, Keith Moxey puts it very well: “Much hinges on whether the concept of the picture is regarded as a ‘placeholder’, a cultural construct that is filled with meaning ascribed to the circumstances in which it is produced and received, or whether it is revered as potentially loaded with iconic presence.” To some degree most paintings are judged on one or the other side of this divide between meaningful circumstance and “iconic presence.” With Chris Watts, we find ourselves somewhere between them, but closer to the former. Most important for understanding Watts’s three series of paintings featured in his solo exhibition Integration, “The Spirits That Lend Strength Are Invisible,” “Blahk on Blahk on Blak,” and “Lapis Lazuli Trials: Chapter 1,” is aptly not “visible.” His paintings are indeed about looking, and about what a painting is or is not. They do have pictorial elements. But the primary value of the paintings lies in the nature of their materials and depends on the subject position from which they are viewed.

Watts follows in a long tradition of dramatic “ambient” abstraction, a lineage that includes the likes of Mark Rothko and late J.M.W. Turner. But I prefer to call his work atmospheric, since the technique uses light to create the non-pictorial illusion of liminal space. Across Watts’s work the approach is not so much a matter of fashioning color into the impression of light, but using transparent material to manipulate light itself, much the way stained-glass creates atmosphere when it refracts and filters light passing through. The painting supports are visible through the acrylic and resin surface of each work and gesture toward painting’s conventions, while the surfaces themselves appear diaphanous against the solidity of their frames. Watts’s unconventional materials really leave an impact in The Spirits That Lend Strength Are Invisible XXXXIII, XXXXII, and XXXVIII (all 2024). Dark and moody, they cast luminosity between their undefined shadows.

Meanwhile, the consistency and material opaqueness that characterizes Ventana Azul I through VI (all 2024), from “Lapis Lazuli Trials: Chapter 1”, sets these works apart from the other, more transparent pieces. Watts made them on organza (a sheer silk fabric woven in China, India, France, and Italy) with lapis lazuli pigment, resulting in their milkiness. Then there is Ambient Painting V (2024), a free-standing work constructed like a room divider, made from sapele wood (Nigerien mahogany) and poly-chiffon, which stands out as an interactive piece. Standing inside the alcove created by the piece evokes an otherworldly experience of lightness. The only missing element is maybe a sapele bench, to more comfortably take in the effect. Watts chooses materials—the sapele, pigments sourced from Peruvian shamans, lapis lazuli, organza and silk—that imbue spiritual force in his works. But whether this invisible spiritual force can be sensed by a viewer is up for debate.

Much of the meaningful substance of Watts’s paintings is driven by his own relationship to spirituality and identity via object presence and absence. Selections from the “Blahk on Blahk on Blak” series, A Diamond Story, parts III and V (both 2020), I’m going home (Chariot of Elijah) (2021), and I’m just different (Fire of Elijah) (2021) illustrate this point. Watts struggled through watching hours of police body camera footage, public surveillance tapes, and pedestrian-made videos of brutality against Black Americans, and edited these recordings down to a number of stills, which he then used for reference imagery. After painting each still, he would immediately obscure the image by erasing it. Without knowing his process in advance of seeing the paintings, one might miss how they are different from his other work. The somber atmosphere of the black-walled chamber where they hang does enough to create a space of contemplation. But knowledge of these erasures lends an eeriness to the installation, an awareness that something is missing. This absence characterizes the pervading melancholy, a feeling of mournfulness over an unconscious loss, which eludes symbolic representation. And Watts’s contemplation of trauma and death, which redacts the symbolic, is an evocative response to the disastrous enormity of systemic violence.