David Hockney: the master illusionist

David Hockney has spent much of his career trying to render the world the way we actually register it, full of panoramic distractions and strobing detail. In real life a glance takes in a dog’s snout and tail as it twirls. A sock tossed in the corner of a room rockets to our attention. Distant hills and the earth at our feet flow together in a sense of continuous space. Photography and realistic painting have compressed three-dimensional existence through frames, composition and depth — useful lies that Hockney has tried, not always successfully, to dispel. He yearns to move beyond the single-point perspective of the Renaissance to the far side of illusionism.

His latest work, at the Pace Gallery in New York, undercuts the conventions we know, and the results are at once wondrous and gimmicky. In mural-scaled photographs, he takes advantage of digital tools that can make the ordinary strange. Vaster than history paintings yet intimate in tone, these new works place the artist in a virtual version of his studio, surrounded by his creations. Come in, the scene exhorts: I will show you my universe so that you can learn to look properly at yours.

Beyond the jelly-bean-coloured surfaces and pleasure-filled scenes that made him a global celebrity — and that made the recent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum so joyous — Hockney has always toyed with our habits of sight. He assembled scores of snapshots into faceted scenes, hinting at all that an ordinary photo omits. In his collages of swimming pools and desert highways, Hockney did the viewer’s work, patching sequences into vibrant approximations of experience. Those mosaics didn’t instruct us where to focus; they encouraged the eye to roam.

In his first video, “The Jugglers, June 24, 2012”, Hockney applied that same visual freedom to motion. He deployed 18 screens to achieve a compound perspective, offering multiple answers to the riddle of what happened, and how. His answers were imprecise and elusive — the harder he worked to nail down a slice of reality, the more shifting, textured and complex it became.

There are limits to these revelations, though. In the Pace show, Hockney pushes painting further than it will go — or rather, he falls back on old tricks and insists they have never been attempted before. There is nothing astonishing about the canvases that reprise recognisable themes — the Grand Canyon, or the blue deck of his Hollywood Hills home — except that he has lopped the bottom left and right corners off the traditional rectangular frame to produce a bowl-like hexagonal shape.

Hockney makes extravagant claims for this geometric innovation: the notched corners are epic, opening fresh frontiers and recasting the familiar in revolutionary new terms. “Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden”, for instance, becomes “A Bigger Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden” (2017). The same cobalt walkway wraps around the same explosion of tropical green, only this time, Hockney states in the catalogue, they’re . . . bigger. “The indentations paradoxically widen the sense of space and invite all sort of fresh lines of sight . . . Far from cutting corners, I was adding them.”

Hyperbole aside, notching a rectangle into a hexagon doesn’t magically transform perception. It has, however, released Hockney’s puckish side. In “Hither and Dither” four figures, blue cutouts like cast-offs from Matisse, dart along Escher-like ramps and down (or is it up?) stairways that circle back in an impossible spiral. The runners appear trapped by high red walls, but two black-and-white panels invite escape on to straight roads that recede toward separate horizons. They might be a pair of movie screens, or paintings or sentimental views of a wide-open continent.

It is because of primary-hued frolics like this one that Hockney is often likened to Matisse, but the more apt comparison is to Picasso, who took nature apart and reassembled it askew. The photomontages are Cubist in spirit, exploding a view into its component parts. Hockney’s recent paintings, with their woozy sense of space, resonate with Picasso’s later portraits, in which all sides of the face are visible at once, the features squished into fantastic grotesques. Now Hockney has found a new tool to extend the eye, see around corners, and bend the plane. Digital technology allows him to play freely with the basic physics of vision.

He discovered his latest approach by accident and methodical labour. As the vans gathered at his studio to collect the paintings and cart them off to Pace, Hockney and his technology assistant, Jonathan Wilkinson, photographed the work from every vantage point. They fed thousands of pictures through software that fused them into composites. Furniture, rugs and the artist himself received the same treatment, producing 3D models that could be rotated in the virtual space of a computer screen.

The result is “In the Studio”, a seamless suite of seven floor-to-ceiling panels that are cinematic and mesmerising, an art-world version of a CGI set. Hockney arranged objects to seem simultaneously vivid and unreal, scrawling in shadows that make nonsense of traditional lighting. Everything is subtly, intriguingly wrong. The studio’s back wall either dissipates or bends miraculously. Miniature versions of the paintings in the show reappear in two dimensions, sitting on easels and leaning against walls but also levitating somehow. A wooden stool in the foreground pops up again towards the back. And in the middle of it all is Hockney himself, sporting a striped cardigan and a red and pink ascot. Weightlessly skimming over the white floor, he is the illusionist of his own environment, a mind-altering ringmaster enwreathed by beautiful beasts.

Until May 12, pacegallery.com

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