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| ABOUT TRaC |
Visual Arts TRaC Fall 2004
Will Cotton at Mary Boone Will Cotton's solo exhibition at Mary Boone's gallery is every heterosexual 12-year-old boy's fantasy: a world full of naked women and candy. The merits of the show, however, are debatable (although the offensive quality of the portrayal of women is not). One thing is for sure: Cotton has mastered the deadly sins of gluttony and lust. Each of the four large paintings, averaging about six by seven feet, oil on linen, portrays a naked woman surrounded by sweets, and each hangs on a separate wall in the relatively nondescript square, white-walled room. Opposite the gallery's entrance is Cotton Candy Cloud (2004), which shows a reclining female nude softly resting in a bed of pink, cotton-candy clouds. The woman's relaxed position, with her arms tucked behind her head, and her calm expression is reminiscent of other famous nudes in art history. One recalls the reclining nude that would set the standard for all thereafter: Titian's self-assured Venus of Urbino (1538). Like Titian and his peers in Venice in the 16th century, Cotton relies on the use of light and color to convey mood, as well as enhance the painting esthetically. The whole painting hangs, sugar-coated in a soft pink, dreamy light, emphasizing the ethereal setting. Even the nude looks out of this world: an idealized pinup girl. The pink light rids her of impurities and heer seductive pose turns her into a sexual object; she is painted just as soft and sugary as the cotton candy surrounding her. If pink isn't your thing, hanging to your right is the colorful Untitled (2003) filled with hanging toffee and wrapped candies, featuring a nude reclining on her side (with her back to us) gaing, eyes closed, upward. There is the slightest hint of modesty with the nude's (bubblegum pink) lace underwear that, mind you, is relatively see-through. Once again Cotton turns the female nude into a piece of candy by using fleshy tones that, like the first painting, mimic the candies around them in their richness and saturation. Cotton's paintings seem so centered around the dubious parallels between women and candy, by illustrating that each evokes the same carnivorous lust, it is curious that Cotton began his career painting works solely of candy, and added women to his candy-covered scenes only after Mary Boone took him under wing possibly an attempt to make them more marketable. And marketable they seem to be. Whether or not Cotton intended his art to be a commentary on the portrayal of women in the media and in society, the result is a series of paintings that objectify women as merely eye candy for the heterosexual male. Despite all this, art buyers with a sweet tooth seem to be willing to pay upwards of 50 thousand dollars for these high-priced sugar fixes.
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