Where there is (a) Will, there’s a Way

What’s that!?!

I’m in love!

Well, that’s not new, because you can fall in love several times a day for the little things. But this is different, this time, pretty sure! I’m in love with the artworks of Will since I saw them for the first time.

Just flashed. Longing. Inspired.

And that love for art and U.S.-American ranch life is a wonderful combination is even shown in the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longest_Ride_(film) in which the professional bull rider Luke meets Sophia, student of art history and – despite all cultural and distance-related adversities – falls in love.

Art.

Cowboys.

Love.

And a drama with a happy ending.

Thus the movie.

Will(iam) Cotton is an American artist, born 1965 in Melrose/Massachusetts, who lives and works in New York City and, regarding his current subjects in his artwork, spent a time in Wyoming once. He does cowgirls, cowboys and pink unicorns, bedded in landscapes similar to the land of milk and honey.

Actually Will gained notoriety by painting sugary landscapes, close-up’s of ice-cream-mountains, sugar-houses made of delicious cookies, chocolate-sauce-lakes and cotton-candy-clouds.

Sticky.

Sweet.

Playful children’s dreams! And in them one or another, soft-naked feminine beauty nestled in honey-sweet clouds or their bodies decorated with sauce and whipped cream. Presenting a seductive world, which seems so flawless that one is almost desperate to find abysses in it.

We start looking for the dirty taste behind the sweet one.
Exhibition catalog . Will Cotton Paintings . 1999 – 2004 . Daniel Templon

And despite the fact that Will treats food and the consumption of it as a subject, we’re not able to find the critical irony known from Pop Art in his paintings, completely left to our own devices, if we want to find a more serious background, we can think of diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease. However, much more obviously, the artist invites us to see the abundance and the desire, a huge longing, for food and pleasure.

Paradies!

For several years, Will has devoted himself to the image of the lonesome cowboy as a symbolic image of the US, which he knows to introduce in a completely new way. Thanks to him, pink unicorns jump through puddles of milk and cream, are presented in front of sugar-clouds and flamingo-pink skies, predominantly young handsome men with sexy bodies on their backs.

Will Cotton poursuit sa réflexion sur la pop-culture et les mythes américains.
Press Release – Templon

This artist sugar-coats the cliché of the western rider, the masculine cowboy on a wild horse, thus symbolizing a free, unbridled, wild America with cutesy kitsch, and depicts homogenous eroticism as well as childlike elements, the latter because his subjects, apart from the nudity of the gorgeous men, could just as well depict a picture book wallpaper in a child’s room.

The unicorn’s unicorn, for example, is like a candy cane from a fairground, and the animal’s eyes, clearly too big for a horse’s head, look somewhat naively into the world.

Moreover, the men are almost too good to be true, with perfectly trimmed beard, swinging the pink lasso between their fingers, mint green chaps flap around the muscular legs, or man also sits completely naked in the western saddle, stands in the stirrups, the bodies dipped in the perfect beach tan.

In the current exhibition Trigger at Gallery Templon à Paris, Will introduces the cowgirl for the first time in a(n) (solo) exhibition. The American woman with stylish 50s retro hairstyle, cowboy hat on it, and only wears glittering underwear with her leather chaps.

Melting Icecream.

Froot Loops.

Meringues.

In addition the horse’s halter spiked with lollipops and sweets, and enviably long eyelashes around baby-blue eyes: at the horse.

Everything, almost too good to be true. And it is, because who in his life has ever seen such a clean horse and galloped over vanilla-ice-cream-hills, crossed root-beer-swamps?

An exhibition, however, at least due to the wonderful humor of the artist is particularly great fun, with its greatest opposites united. He also invents a world of his own that reflects our schizophrenic society, in which grandiose landscapes host a playful scenery that at the same time is disturbing, like a too opulent, too idealized country, here: America.

The dream is real, however, in that the image of the Wild West and art can be successfully combined, just like Luke & Sophia in The Longest Ride. Dreams come true if you believe in them. Pretty sure!

Or:

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Always.

Will Cotton . Current exhibition : Trigger . @Gallery Templon . 75003 Paris . 30 rue Beaubourg .