Cameron Larson is a step ahead of most students at Cornish College of the Arts when it comes to formulating a mystique: He's already been arrested for his art. Graffiti, specifically.

"I loved the smell," he reminisces in a slightly sad way. "Going out in the streets. Being alone. Painting huge and fast. But I ended up going to jail a couple of times, and I realized I had to wise up."

Hence art school, and this studio, which is studded with oil paintings painstakingly made on canvas. These took hours rather than seconds, planning rather than spontaneity. They might have happened in a night, but all night. And yet you can make out ghosts of the graffiti if you know to look for them. There's one large painting in particular where Larson's history lurks like an open secret: It features the deep pink-purple folds of a woman's dress, which right in the center of the image form into something akin to an elaborately illegible cartoon signature, the kind you see in the way-backs of parking garages, where, sheltered from eyes and weather, a veritable graffiti museum can spring up.

The dress in this painting also calls to mind another strain of art entirely, the history of draped fabrics that goes back hundreds of years. Except the name of the clothier "bebe" appears, stretched out but recognizable, across it. Larson made the painting using an old punk-rock trick—taking an image and moving it around on a Xerox machine while copying it, to create distortions. He paints based on that mutated image. The original bebe ad with the beautiful young woman in a dress, ripped from a fashion magazine, now becomes a three-headed monster wearing a blank stare. Larson means his work as a commentary on the distortions inherent in advertising's preternatural smoothness. "Ads are trying to sell people something that's not really there, and using women to establish a relationship with these objects," he says. "I don't think that's right. What you end up with are these really rich fabrics, but the model is dead. The human is a shell."

In pornography he sees a similar manipulation of viewer and subject alike. His large 2008 painting Skin Deep pictures a threesome of naked bodies, their unsettlingly cotton-candy skin covering dark, mottled, rotting flesh underneath. A man is moaning in pleasure, but his head is skeletal, as if his face has burned away. Body parts stretch grotesquely. They are connected but out of scale, as in a surrealist painting by Dalí—and it turns out a repeating neck is a particularly horrifying thing. A woman's awful tongue snakes onto a nipple. Candy-colored, hardcore cartoon painters like the Americans Sue Williams and Peter Saul (or even Lisa Yuskavage) come to mind, but Larson also displays a streaky realism that reaches in the other direction toward the macabre visions of South African artist Marlene Dumas.

Larson says it's awkward to talk about his works, since they deliberately raise taboo subjects. Maybe that's why his studio is divided, thematically, in half: One half is devoted to images based on porn and advertising, and the other to obsessive collecting and mark-making. Larson collected cigarette ash for a year; now he's painting a giant Marlboro man using it (taking a chapter from Richard Prince, he admits; Seattle's Chris Jordan is another reference). Little hills of beer bottle caps, arranged by color, fill most of the studio floor. They're intended to become a mosaic portrait of Uncle Sam.

How the halves come together—the images of women and the images of obsession, both laboriously constructed using a combination of mindless and mindful repetition (speaking of graffiti)—is an ongoing project for Larson. He's been experimenting in psychedelic-­ish digital animation, Pop-­inflected prints based on digital line drawings overlaid with text, and, well, matchbooks: rows and rows of matchbooks, arranged tightly in tidy compositions that mask their potential for destruction. (Everything will be on display during an open house at the Cornish studios on January 29.)

There's one painting hanging on Larson's wall that he didn't intend as a finished work, but it pretty much is one. It's a found scrap of canvas, spattered with black paint, on which he's overpainted the words of a single day's actions in pink all-caps so that the line breaks are indiscriminate, as in a painting by Christopher Wool. As Larson says, it's a matter of two sides: "Simplify, complicate. Simplify, complicate. Simplify, complicate..." recommended