Will Cotton
Will Cotton
New York artist Will Cotton returns to Paris’ Galerie Templon on Impasse Beaubourg with a new exhibition that examines ideas of desire and lack: landscapes made of icre cream and candyfloss, the most ephemeral of sweets.
Playfully alluding to 18th century French painters such as Fragonard and Boucher, Will Cotton’s paintings are utopian evocations. Bountiful landscapes are inhabited by creatures bedecked in confectionery diadems, a cross between angel, goddess and pin-up. Their scantily covered bodies, inviting yet inaccessible, are ‘posed’ within an ambiguous universe where the boundary between earth and sky has disappeared.
Will Cotton explains that his art addresses the power of the unsatisfiable: “Insatiability. As Lacan has pointed out the state of desire depends on lack, and so for that to persist, it’s most important that desire is never totally fulfilled. The object of desire exists only as fantasy and is therefore maintained by its own impossibility.” More than simply a reflection on hedonism and the consumer society, his paintings ponder the very act of painting and the role of the viewer, an insatiable voyeur.
The artist
Born in 1965 in the USA, Will Cotton lives and works in New York. The artist belongs to the generation of American painters who have taken the language of figurative style painting in a totally new direction. He works in his studio building giant confectionary-based assemblages, such as gingerbread houses, sweets, cake mountains and chocolate seas, opening the door to the creation of a new reality. Will Cotton sees his works as utopias that explore the notions of temptation and excess.
