Thomas Woodruff at P.P.O.W - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, June, 1997 by Richard Kalina

Thomas Woodruff set himself the challenge of creating 365 paintings, uniform in size but otherwise quite different, of apples -- one for each day of the year. The result, a single work titled Apple Canon, was on exhibit at P.P.O.W. this spring, and viewing it was both pleasurable and somewhat daunting. Woodruff set the 9-by-8-inch canvases into a large grid, blanketing three of the main gallery's four walls. The overall grid was separated into 12 smaller sections (corresponding to the months), and each section contained 30 or 31 paintings, hung five wide by six high and spaced a few inches apart on the wall. In five of the months an extra panel was appended to the lower right corner of the grouping to provide for the extra day. (February, mysteriously, got more than it strictly should have.)

All of this provided structure, but not really a program for viewing. There was, for example, no shift in the seasons, nor any obvious serial progression. This encouraged distraction and a browsing sort of read. Looking at one painting I felt myself immediately drawn away to something else even more interesting. The single subject and the overall format brought an emblematic unity to the ensemble, while the intensity, clarity and inventiveness of each of the canvases worked to undermine it.

Woodruff paints with a Flemish precision, and his acrylic surfaces are lovingly layered, scumbled and glazed. The apples seem to glow, each one as much portrait -- ranging from goofy to somber -- as still life. The apples are generally depicted on a horizontal tablelike surface about three quarters of the way down the painting, set against a plain but nuanced background. in some instances, however, the apples are shown against complex curtainlike draperies, several of which are pulled back to reveal landscapes.

Woodruff put his subjects through their paces. He used every variety of apple he could buy, and displayed them in every sort of permutation. He bit them, carved them, garnished them with flowers, stacked them snowman-fashion with other fruits (a green apple topped with a kiwi and a lime, for example), propped them up with toothpicks, suspended them by cords. In one particularly lively grouping, little worms pop out, each with its own persona. There is a punk worm (sunglasses, Mohawk, body piercing); a coal miner worm; a bandito worm (mustache and sombrero); a Viking worm (very Wagnerian); an artist worm with a tiny palette; and, in the last painting of the entire ensemble, a doctor worm shown slinking away, defeated, of course, by the apple-a-day regimen.

These are witty, well-made paintings, not the least lacking in ambition. Apple Canon is, after all, one piece (Woodruff refuses to sell the paintings separately), and the cumulative effect ultimately becomes the point. A canon -- besides being church dogma and the collective term for those works of art, music or literature generally deemed essential to a culture -- is a musical form, a contrapuntal composition whose melody is repeated by successive voices, differently pitched. Musical metaphors applied to art works are often strained, but in this case the match is gratifyingly exact.