“Michael Woodcock makes paintings that do curious things with time and space while never letting you forget the here-and-now. That’s no mean feat, and the L.A. artist makes it look easy, or at least as if it’s no big deal. Neither precious nor unduly impressed with themselves, his square wood panels present brief, fleeting moments loaded with enough potential to be anything but incidental. Each of his humble, understated paintings is a down-to-earth instance in which the simplest of things seem to burst with significance—to be just the right mix of everyday obviousness and transcendent mystery that the unlikely combination triggers insights into our mundane, otherwise unremarkable surroundings by heightening our emotional connection to the world around us, which we sometimes share with others and at other times inhabit as if all alone.
As an artist, he has the uncanny capacity to compress, condense, and concentrate loads of potential significance in razor-sharp phrases that, on the face of it, are nothing special and might be uttered by anyone, any day of the week. This is what distinguishes Woodcock’s one-liners from most of those out there. Rather than wrapping things up, making fun of others, or getting the last word in, his perfectly pedestrian phrases are starting points for stories that take off in many directions, often simultaneously, gaining energy, impact, and intrigue from the images they are paired with, not to mention the subtle strangeness of the single-color fields that surround both them and the pictures they complicate.”
— David Pagel, 2010
