David Hockney, Ma Normandie — Galerie Lelong & Co.
The Lelong & Co. gallery is presenting, until February 27, 2021, a major exhibition dedicated to David Hockney’s adventure in Normandy. Confined inside a Norman house, he has been observing the luxuriance of this countryyard’s spring of which he captured the light and tried to reveal, behind the quiet freedom of its vegetation, the intense life beating behind every second he spent in its heart.
His painting is revealed today, in its radical singularity and its irresistible beauty, not only as one of the most emblematic of our time but also as a formidable tool to engage in dialogue with the history of art, to question centuries of invention and reinvention of representation. The line still acts as a sign and this Normandy, more than ever, can be read through the grid that has built the gaze of David Hockney which is revealed here in a magnificent reduction where the painting, by touches as precise as they are alive, trembles with a fever of color which continues to inhabit the painter.
Looking at Hockney’s images ends up confronting this specific gaze haunted by the masters and projected into the future, always on the lookout (whether it is his photographic experiences mentioned above or his regular use of the touch pad for making sketches and works) of the unheard of, whether it breaks the codes of representation or invites us to look differently at the richness of the world around us.
As the figure of Monet whom he deeply admires, who took before him refuge in his garden in Giverny to exhaust his appetite for painting, David Hockney has been plunging his palette since 2019 into a project elaborated during a visit to the Queen’s tapestry Mathilde de Bayeux: painting the spring in the Normandy countryside. After months of research and intensive practice at the beginning of this year 2020, all of us amateurs are now keepers of a new treasure: a total artwork, where the methods, from acrylic painting, drawing ink to canvas born from a spectral investigation, reflecting variations in light, in the air, on the land and in the mood.
Compose, invent, borrow, David Hockney, as the art historian he is, revisits his peers slipping into Normandy the painting stories of Provence, the mirages of Tahiti, les ocres siennes from America, the tormented Flemish skies and the damp mood of North of England. Depending on the feelings of a region that can both smear the sky with a thunderous gray, make the infinite variations of green vibrate or burst on an immaculate light on its pale ochres, Hockney freezes his landscapes with the dynamics of a time that he reads so well. Torment, plenitude, expectation and contemplation come together in the collage compositions where each element, each leaf of each tree, each blade of each grass affirms its unique reaction to light and directs, for a moment, a personal focus that organizes the nature around it.
With, in line of sight, like a mirror, the anticipation of the spectators’ gazes to come, he adds up the entry points into the painting, this shift of perspective which takes into account the infinity of those which precisely separate the viewer from his painting. A constant force, masterfully deployed here, in his work as graphically, sensibly and sentimentally rich as it is steeped in scholarly research on the focal length and perspective in the history of art. Because it is through his eye, the accuracy and the radicality of the twists that he applies to the perspective that we recognize, whatever the subjects he represents, David Hockney.
If the idea of the circle is declined both physically and in the cycle of seasons, it appears that it has been unfolded, lengthened, and seen its lines stolen to reconstitute it within the space of Hockney’s own workspace, that of his gaze. The significance of the line thus explodes in this new series bringing a kaleidoscopic dimension, focused on the accumulation of points. Multiplying the lines of perspective until reversing them, each element becomes an elementary focal point and, for as long as it’s looked at, the center of the composition. In the humility of its effects, in the sensitive and rough marks of colors, David Hockney seems to make each brushstroke the last, the one on which the eye will definitely have to fix. Until the next; until one is stranded in the vertigo of this reality brutally and conscientiously brought up to the surface, causing the gaze to slip rather than be safe.
Lots of echoes but no repetitions, no short-cuts; each passage, each trace left by the brush vibrates with its pure intensity. It is the virtue of great painters to know how to keep mastery at a distance while maintaining, even in their touch, the doubt of a too harsh light, an unwanted incandescence, a frowning trace. Each painting as a first time, each use of the brush as a possible revelation, Hockney abandons the figure of the master to continue to exercise the reader’s poetry, taking note of the book that nature offers him to try retracing it, to play its sensual score
