ART
Will Cotton |
Written 30 January |
Monday 03 May, 10:00Galerie Daniel Templon, 75003 [map]Will Cotton
New York artist
Will Cotton returns to Paris’ Galerie Templon with a new exhibition that examines ideas of desire and lack and landscapes made of ice cream and candyfloss.
Playfully alluding to 18th century French painters such as
Fragonard and
Boucher, Will Cotton’s paintings evoke a utopian vision. Bountiful landscapes are inhabited by creatures bedecked in confectionery, 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 unsatisfied: “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.
Born in 1965, Will Cotton studied at the New York Academy of Art and the Beaux Arts in Rouen.
