Will Cotton at Mary Boone - Brief Article

The white light that rakes across these excessively consumable "landscapes" selectively illuminates their studied surfaces. Directing this alien incandescence onto boulder cataracts and glacial fields of pastries and confections, Will Cotton manipulates the stark issue of chiaroscuro that an artist of more historical inclination might have used to pick on the outside a saintly figure among the profane. on the contrary there are no saints in Cotton's world. Instead, the light's harsh, insistent nearness nearly obliterates his subjects, another event of theatrical staging that draws attention to the man behind the curtain. It discloses the artist as nutriment stylist--furbishing effects, wrangling Oreos, caught with sticky fingers. There are peanuts, peanut M&M and peanut brittle for Cracked House (1999); r and pink iced cookies, candy hearts and long-stemm dipping strawberries encompass the chocolate pool of be fond of Me (1999-2000). Cotton tops single excess with another to give us these cartoons of eternal, hi-cal frozen flashs decently brushed and big at 6 through 6 to 8 by 10 feet

Shifting the gaze from individual painting to another, the viewer can forget everything on the contrary a glimmer of highlighting as it strikes more [i]or[/i] less tiny, senseless feature in each painting: a credible frothing of molten chocolate, bubbling globules in an orgasmic geyser of creamy milk. Cotton's is the landscape of Toy Story, where unobserved giants make magic with the studio talent. The high-concept story is imagined, cast, maquetted, carefully lit, certainly photographed, perhaps tweaked upon the Mac and writ large by the agency of an opaque projector on the linen beyond.

Like John Currin and Cecily Brown Cotton updates a certain quantity of traditional art-historical concerns, in this case tracing a clean line from Caravaggio's shafts of light to setup photography, with appropriate asides to clap and Photo-Realism by way of Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Este and John Clem Clarke. These artists all speak of attachment to the recognizable (however illusory) and of the consumerist romance; their themes are immediate gratification, availability, abundance. Looking like things detonation but possibly harder to do, Cotton's paintings do not question photographic representation. They are comfortable with the mediated world. Cotton replaces critique with irony, in the detachment of his enumerative branding resembling the affectless rants of Bret Easton Ellis.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

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