Cotton's candy

Will Cotton

king of confectionery and 'cotton' candy. older stuff has darker kind of ephemeral photographic quality to them, but i really like the direction that he went in, which is much lighter (Pastoral) yet still seemingly aware of time (time feels mystical in a funny way?), like Monument / Alpine Ruin. conflates maquettes and "real" homes of an imaginary landscape, or Cotton's "new frontier"

cotton candy cloudscapes with nudes resemble depictions of Venus, which date back to the italian renaissance. Cabanel's Venus, who seems to be posing for the viewer (between dreaming and being awake like a game of cat and mouse with the (male) viewer), diffuses an ebb and flow of erotic tidal energy. Cotton's work, on the other hand, in which "all desire is fulfilled all the time", recognizes that its absence of anything 'lacking' eliminates the potential for any actual desire. desire, Cotton says, can only exist where there 'lacks'
pretty much the opposite of jeff koons' "Made in Heaven" exhibition


CANDY LAND >> "My initial impulse to make these paintings really came out of an awareness of the commercial consumer landscape that we live in. Every day we're bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands of messages designed specifically to incite desire within us."
The Birth of Venus (Alexandre Cabanel) - Cotton Candy Cloud
Girl with the Pearl Earring (Vermeer) - NOEMI
Ripe (Ed Ruscha) - Insatiable
Ames Gate Lodge (H. H. Richardson) / Parc Güell, Entrance Pavillion (Antoni Gaudí) - Nut House 
Teenage Dream - Cotton Candy Katy  << art enthusiast katy perry had "no idea the paintings were so expensive." (imagine that!) pop culture enthusiast mr. cotton emailed her back and asked if she was a singer. well kind of, "P.S., is this Katy Perry, the singer?". you can now buy his reproductions for $9.99 instead of his actual work for 60K, THX GURL \m/

[via MARY BOONE GALLERY, New York, PACE PRINTS, New York, MICHAEL KOHN GALLERY, Los Angeles, BALDWIN GALLERY, Aspen, JABLONKA GALERIE, Cologne, GERMANY, GALERIE DANIEL TEMPLON, Paris, FRANCE]