The artist Ouattara Watts usually enters his studio in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn under the blanket of the night. He has often worked between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. for most of his five-decade career. It is in the relative quiet of these hours that Watts says he can most clearly hear frequencies otherwise muted by the daytime buzz: those of otherworldly and occult elements that appear in his paintings.

Even during the day, Watts’s sanctum-like studio felt a world apart from its industrial environs. On the afternoon of my visit, jazz music culled from his vast CD collection hummed quietly in the background. Several works in progress were propped up on the walls, on which hung signs that read: “No Photos.” (He made an exception for this article.) During our interview, Watts spoke with laconic language and elegant metaphors that delighted in furtive indirection rather than straightforward explication.

Watts’s artworks are charged with their maker’s enigmatic tendencies. Animated by African spiritual traditions, mysticism and metaphysical cosmologies, his paintings — large canvases and wood panels that hover between figuration, abstraction and collage — are dense with unknown elements.

At his studio, he spoke of mixing pigments with a “magic potion” of ingredients that he wouldn’t name to create a color he calls “Watts blue.” The sequences of numbers on some of his canvases are “codes” that must be cracked. “Maybe one day people will know,” he said teasingly. “But not today.”

Several of Watts’s paintings are on view through Dec. 21 at Karma Gallery, in New York, a solo exhibition focused on his work from the 1990s, the decade that set his career in motion. The gallery has also published a 570-page monograph to accompany the show — the first extensive book on Watts’s work. Concurrently, at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, N.H., several of Watts’s paintings are on view in the show “Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ouattara Watts: A Distant Conversation” (through Feb. 23, 2025). The two became fast friends and creative interlocutors after they met at a gallery opening in Paris in the 1980s.