British artist Florence Houston’s ornate paintings of jelly desserts are so pristinely beautiful, so delectably perfect, you could hardly imagine eating them. The gelatinous moulded blob in Wackleberry (2023), which sits perfectly springy on a yellow, gold-trimmed plate, seems too sculptural to cut into with a dessert spoon. The towering pistachio-toned soft serve in a glass dessert coupe, in the painting Neon Whip, is immaculate. Suspended in time, it shows no signs of an impending melt.
Dessert as a motif in art is hardly new, but such sweet stuff has been showing up more and more lately. Houston is not alone in her fascination with these saccharine treats. There is Yvette Mayorga, who pushes her acrylic paints, often Barbie-colored pink, through pastry bags to make her paintings look like they were topped off with frosting. Canadian artist Laura Rokas recently dedicated her exhibition at Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco to buffet-like foods inspired by Betty Crocker and Weight Watchers recipe cards; these include some jelly-like desserts faded like an old photograph sat out too long by the kitchen window. And at Templon this spring, Will Cotton's paintings included mermaids and cowboys loitering in cotton candy clouds and lounging in lollipop forests. One painted character wears a meringue on her head.
In our current dopamine-addicted age, these brightly artificial, luxurious, and sugar-dusted treats seem to offer a momentary escape into sensorial pleasure. But under that sweet reprieve is a biting critique of accelerated capitalism and our recessionary times. In an age of sensory overload, we are forced to wonder: Are we merely addicted to seductive surfaces...?
-Kate Brown
August 11, 2025
