An intensive art takes over Paris

Hockney's incandescent painting sweeps through the Fondation Louis Vuitton at the gates of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. A surprise. David Hockney's career today undoubtedly displays the greatest international presence of British art. Trained at London's Royal College of Art, he was soon dazzled by the chromaticism and sharp figuration of Pop Art, an art form that reclaimed urban everyday life, with a striking ironic key tempered by a curious emotional chord—let's be honest. Distracted by the lacerating figures of Francis Bacon and his bloody struggle against the brutality of events, a providential sardonic streak already foreshadowed, from the outset, the powerful, personalized drift that honed Hockney's versatile gaze: the group portrait, the graphic biography, and the fantasized landscape. His early endeavors rework images from popular culture, which translate into an immediate visual projection. Soon came the New York experience, the provocative ductility of graffiti, and the bold leap to California, where his coloramas took on an iconic dimension. Later came the landscapes and photographic figurations of indelible formal entity: light and color between sharp profiles accentuate visual malleability.

With this exceptional background and his computer expertise on the rise, Hockney assaults the magnetic spaces of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in a visionary display that will mark an era. Four hundred works occupy the entire exhibition space. Having become the curator of the show, the artist prioritizes this moment to fully account for his creations over the last quarter of a century. A visual sequence that dominates eleven galleries, I insist, preluded by the historical canvases covering the years between 1960 and 2000, from his personal studio. These are works that arrive still damp, as the painter says: “I exhibited at the Paris-Centre Pompidou eight years ago, but I've painted quite a bit since then. The time has come for an interventive presentation, I would say, that lays bare the charged atmosphere of the studio.” Bigger Trees near Warter (2007), an enigma composed of 50 canvases, is a work that baffles us, and follows A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998) with no fewer than 60 works. An admirable complex that comes from the National Gallery of Canberra.

Hockney storms the Fondation Louis Vuitton in a visionary, epoch-making display

The striking Parisian presentation concludes suddenly and concisely. “Happy when I paint,” the master continues, “and satisfied to be able to transmit the wake of a lived need.” The painter beams a farewell to the audience in the closing room of the exhibition with the definitive and conclusive self-portrait. David Hockney, attentive before The Arrival of Spring (2017), is a resounding feat. Throughout his immense oeuvre, the artist has carefully avoided fantasizing about any of the pictorial illusions of reality that his imagination prodigies, achieving the utmost legibility and quality that situate his works, their personal and elaborate concept and action, over time.

For the exhibition's curators, "a highly representative example, because it comes at the curious moment in Hockey's painting, in which he always returns to Yorkshire, but in time to serenely, peacefully, see the flowering of the fields of color." He creates these works in his own way, from sketches and his prodigious memory. It's incredible, the curators point out. It's worth emphasizing an important fact: some of the works on display have never been exhibited before. Hockney is already in a new, unpredictable century, certainly not his own, but one that shares the extreme demands that color his intense activity. "The eternal spring of his painting" that can leave no one indifferent. An intense, unique, and unrepeatable experience, perhaps. A return to nature, without a doubt, following his resettlement in Europe after long years immersed in the Californian landscape. Perhaps as was the case with Pablo Picasso, a true admirer of the British painter from an early age, Hockney surprises and overwhelms with his interpretation of the great, equally timeless art of past masters. Some works are in themselves a masterclass in painting: Garrowby Hill (2017) is a memorable example.