Will Cotton: Paintings 1999-2004

Will Cotton once described himself as landscape painter, but for more than five years now his fantasy scenes have been enriched by soft, scantily clad and nude women enjoying the singularly imagined scenery. They lounge around biscuit balconies, chocolate waterfalls, whipped-cream geysers, toffee rocks and flan islands, safe inside the lollipop hedges of a rich fantasyland. Cotton, who used to begin each painting by making a maquette of a candy scene with real products and photographing it, has, rather than opt to work from multiple images or from life, enlarged that initial photography process dramatically, creating large-scale stage sweets and bringing out gigantic portions of real ones, and posing models among them. The succulence of Cotton's subject matter is a perfect match for each piece's eventual lustrous finish, which is as deliberately academic as it is smooth and rich.