David Hockney’s Normandy landscapes by algorithm can’t fool the eye

After the dark, dreary winter we’ve all endured, who isn’t heartened by the advent of spring? Like an evangelist spreading the good word, this is the message that David Hockney brings: 116 “paintings”, created on his iPad, across three galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts, documenting the eruption of blossom, and hope, in a four-acre field surrounding his higgledy-piggledy property in Normandy, where he passed the pandemic, having moved there in 2019.

Those joyless epidemiologists, Hockney observes with customary defiance, couldn’t cancel spring. To prove it, here’s a picture of a tub of daffodils. And another, of a flowering bough. In fact, if it’s blossoming trees you’re after, you’re in the right place. The RA has become an arboretum. This aisle for pear, cherry, and linden. Round the back for willow, poplar, quince. Love life: these days, apparently, that’s Hockney’s mantra. Who but a killjoy would quibble with that? Of course, Hockney has always been a hedonist, not a doom-monger. That’s why we love him back: because he imparts joy.

The show’s feel-good works, printed on paper, and mounted on aluminium so that their surfaces have nary a wrinkle or bump, are hung chronologically. First up is an image of a purplish tree, created in February 2020. Bare branches, crisp light: still winter. Five months later, we’re in Hockney’s leafy garden, under a full moon. High summer. Typically, he says, each picture takes 12 hours. While some of us were on furlough, he was putting in a shift. He’s always been a grafter, too.

Aside from the odd building, or occasional glimpse of outdoor furniture, there’s little sign of human life. Rather, nature’s irrepressible, frothing abundance is our theme. Gradually, we come to know every inch of Hockney’s grounds, almost as well as he does. Here’s the pond, dimpled with raindrops. Over there, a treehouse, in a gnarly old pear. That’s the willow, beside the artist’s timber-frame “little Seven Dwarfs house”, as he describes it. Oh, yes, and this way leads to a row of poplars beside the river.

Hang on, didn’t somebody else rather famous paint poplars? Monet lived 90 miles down the road, at Giverny, for four decades. He was obsessed with his garden, too. Hockney has recorded the arrival of spring before, along the hedgerows and bridleways of East Yorkshire, in its woods and on the wolds. I still remember his surreal paintings of hawthorns like pulsating ooze-monsters, lathered with blossom like shaving foam.

The fruits of that campaign, including 51 iPad “drawings”, as he called them then, appeared at the RA in 2012. Now, for the sequel, he’s parked his tanks on Monet’s lawn. Evanescent atmospheric effects. Working in series. Lily pads! Hockney, Impressionism’s heir.

All the springtime cheer, though, becomes a bit relentless. After a while, it seems dementedly upbeat. A forced smile, then. And Hockney’s chosen medium only heightens the strange, synthetic atmosphere. Most of us, by now, are sick of Zoom and Teams. We’re fed up Facetiming family members we can’t hug. The last thing we need is more screen time. Yet this is what Hockney, who has always been a sucker for technology, provides.

He calls these pictures paintings. He may use the Brushes app, but they’re not. Sure, he’s fluent with the software, which he honed with the developer, so that bespoke effects are at his fingertips. Without exception, though, the results have an airless, artificial quality. Study them closely and you realise why.

When Hockney drags a stylus across his screen, effects meant to add “texture” and variety appear, as if by magic. But the repertoire of marks is surprisingly limited. Zig-zags, trails of dots, clusters of tiny circles like half-eaten blackberries. A set of lines like a bird’s footprint. A miniature, Matisse-like vegetal form that, distractingly, resembles a baseball mitt.

All are artfully designed to look irregular, organic, as if made by a living artist’s hand. The human eye, though, instantly recognises them for what they are: computer-generated clip art. They’re too uniform. The dots, for instance, are perfectly round and even, like circles in a colour-blindness test. Every repeated, stamp-like little icon is identical. It’s robotic. Landscape by algorithm. An android’s dream of the natural world.

Just when we’re hankering for something tangible, physical, why this flat, simulated spontaneity rather than the real deal of the artist’s touch? Perhaps, on an iPad, you don’t notice the pictures’ digital DNA. Blown up, you do.

Stand further back, and the graphical building blocks disappear. Yet, the uncanny artifice remains. Background colours are matt, unmodulated, blank. A soft-edged spray-paint effect, which makes you squint, jars against nearby elements in sharp focus. The lighting is homogenous, a legacy of Hockney’s bright, backlit screen. As a result, there’s hardly any sense of spatial recession: foreground and background occupy the same plane. Compositionally, too, things get monotonous. A procession of trees in the middle of the frame, against a low horizon.

It’s hard to think of a more naturally gifted artist than Hockney. Even he, though, on an iPad, struggles to depict various things. Shadows, for instance, rarely convince, undermining comparisons with the Impressionists, whose shadows are quivering patches of many different colours. Water, too, appears gelatinous, defeating this master of the swimming pool. The sun shining through branches is also awkward, like a Garter Star pinned on at the end. Squiggly white marks, representing moonbeams silvering leaves, have all the glint of Tipp-Ex.

Occasionally, Hockney emphasises the waywardness of his hand: a wobbly caption, beneath a study of a branch of blossom, misspells the word “cherry”, preserving a crossed-out, superfluous “e”. But, on an iPad, everything can be instantly reversed. It’s contrived.

I'm aware that critics like me won’t deter the hordes. People want a break from all the gloom, and fair enough: there’s a lot here that’s easy to enjoy. But the grandiose claims for Hockney’s iPad “paintings” are excessive. Because the app he uses still isn’t sophisticated enough to trick the eye, something about them just feels off.

From May 23 until Sept 26; royalacademy.org.uk