Will Cotton Solo Exhibition of New Works

Will Cotton’s solo exhibition of new works runs from April 29 to June 19 at the Daniel Templon gallery. Will Cotton (born 1965) is a New York painter whose sensual, charming, and sweet paintings are so indulgent and erotic that they make one drool. His work recalls eighteenth-century French Rococo painters such as Fragonard and Boucher. With an aesthetic, sensory, mannered, and unreal style, it approaches nineteenth-century French Academic painters like Cabanel and Bouguereau.

Cotton’s paintings depict utopian or heavenly scenes, often placing perfectly sculpted, sexy bodies with pale skin, charming faces, and streamlined curves—nude women, angels, and goddesses—among swirling clouds or in natural landscapes filled with flying foam. However, upon closer inspection, these figures resemble mouth-watering ice cream: delicious, romantic, sexy, and full of eroticism. Their provocative charm opens the viewer’s heart and mind, tempting them to take a bite to satisfy their insatiable inner desires. They serve as a mirror to today’s hedonistic and super-consumer society, existing between reality and imagination, consumption and desire, sensation and pleasure.

Will Cotton questions the insatiable power desire of consumer society through his paintings, explaining: “For me, desire is an important element to explore. The key is that this desire can never be satisfied.” Citing Lacan, he notes that desire is closely related to lack; the object’s absence stems directly from humanity’s unfulfillable desires. Thus, his work offers satire and criticism of contemporary consumer society and hedonism. The painter self-questioningly engages in mechanical painting behavior, while simultaneously positioning the audience as perpetual, unsatisfiable voyeurs.