Every picture tells a story...
If there is a story to be found in Evan Woodruffe’s new suite of paintings, it’s not a logical, linear one – but one more akin to the shadowy and fragmentary memory of a dream, that dissolves on waking.
In The Dangerous Looseness of Doom, Woodruffe expands on themes present in his previous exhibitions Lost Blue Heaven and Scene: beauty, desire, temptation, melancholy.
Using images from both private and public archives, the paintings are inhabited by figures and faces, interiors and exteriors, light and shadow: a woman pulls her shirt up over bare breasts; a trio of figures huddle in ankle deep water; light reflects off broken windowpane of an abandoned house; a man holds his head in his hands.
These apparently unconnected works are linked together tonally by Woodruffe’s restrained yet dramatic monochrome palette of grey, ivory and sepia.
The paintings are compelling vignettes filled with possibility; they offer up moments that are like snatches of a longer narrative; overheard but not understood: questions without answers.
As Leigh Martin writes in the catalogue essay, this allows for the possibility that the images, considered individually, might be misread: we may respond to them as “arousing, unsettling, offensive, trivial, innocent, or possibly threatening”, but we are unable to evaluate the appropriateness of our response.
