No review I’ve written has ever led to as much whingeing as my piece on David Hockney’s big show of landscapes at the Royal Academy in 2021. The problem was that this giant of modern art had done the whole thing on an iPad. Every brushstroke was digital, every colour a luminous RGB, and people hated it. ‘Where’s the materiality?! Where’s the expressiveness?!? WHERE’S THE FKN PAINTING!?!?!’
But not me, no sir. I loved it. And now Hockers is back with more tablet shenanigans that will get the people grumbling again. His new show at Annely Juda is a collection of landscapes and 20 flower paintings. Irises and daffs and roses poke out of glass vases and ceramic jugs on gingham tablecloths, over and over again. Some petals are splodgy and fuzzy, others are striated and static-y, Hockney using digital brushes that blur and stutter. They’re very simple but very pretty things.
Downstairs is a bunch of composite landscapes made of clashing panels of colour. They’re big sweeping Technicolor vistas of rolling hills and rainy days. The one just as you walk in on your right looks like Nickelodeon vomited on a tarpaulin. It’s great. If he’d done them with real paint and real canvas people would be going nuts for them.
But that’s where the problem comes in. People put the materiality of paint and its handling on a pedestal. They want to see a master being masterly with their medium. Which makes sense. Skill is important, being able to communicate a vision is important. But is it all that matters? Or does the end product win out over its methodology?
If he’d done them with real paint and real canvas people would be going nuts for them
I had a little debate about these works with my friend Luke – who is a brilliant painter – and he said: ‘You seem to be wilfully missing the material properties of paint in this conversation, as if making something with wood and metal and Epsom ink and oil paint are all the same.’ And in this case, I think they are, because what matters is the aesthetic result, taking the medium and bending it to your will, twisting it so that you define it, instead of it defining you.
It’s not that the iPad, the medium, doesn’t matter – it does, it defines the way these works look, how they glow and hum and shimmer – it’s that regardless of the medium, these are unmistakable Hockneys. No matter what he’s using, his vision comes across. He could smear his own faeces on a wall and it would still look like a Hockney. These are just more evidence of what a special painter he is.
So forget the grumbling; if you like Hockney, you should like these, and if you don’t, don’t come whingeing to me.