David Hockney review – A view of nature from 90 meters away that only looks great on your phone | art

DThe thirsty Hockney reassured post-war Britain that it was okay to enjoy beauty and freedom. He emerged in the late 1950s, when the energy unleashed by the artistic revolutions of half a century earlier had dissipated into dull academia or weary masculinity, and his unabashed celebration of traditional forms of beauty invigorated modern painting. These sentimental diptychs and domestic scenes celebrated the liberal (if not uncomplicated) lifestyles made possible by the economic and social reforms of the period, without the anxiety or cynicism that infected the work of those peers for whom these changes were more ambivalent. (If you’re working class and gay, what’s not to like, after all?)

Calling Hockney a gifted sentimentalist is not an indirect compliment. In this he resembles Andy Warhol who, for all that he was portrayed as a great manipulator, was distinguished by the purity of his love for the fruits of US capitalism and his genius for communicating this love to those who shared it. Likewise, Hockney’s work should be appreciated, for a decade or so after 1963, for refuting the lie (held by those who would rather read about paintings than look at them) that great art should be difficult to understand, contemptuous of the everyday world, and remain inaccessible to a wider audience.

But then, unfortunately, critical criticism seemed to have reached Hockney’s level. Whether eager to be taken seriously or out of steam, a prominent painter of the era retreated into ill-advised historical dialogues with Picasso and Van Gogh, and began experimenting with media from interior design to fax machines (with mixed results). Thus our greatest pop artists entered the jazz phase. Over the past fifty years, Hockney has been moving between these two modes, occasionally returning from vermicelli to remind us of his gift for direct communication (see his portrait of the divine performer, his poignant drawings of his elderly mother, or his paintings of Yorkshire landscapes in the 2000s). But it is sad to state that most of this exhibition belongs to the later stages of the jazz trend.

At its heart is a 90-metre-long frieze entitled “A Year in Normandy”.. Dramatically mounted to act like a ribbon around the perimeter of the North Serpentine Gallery, this massive print depicts the changing landscape around Hockney’s home in France through the seasons. It is made up of about 100 separate digital images, each formed by running a rubber-tipped “brush” across the iPad’s screen. These images were stitched together on a computer, enlarged to the gallery’s dimensions, and then printed on a single strip of paper to tell a story about the seasons, much as the Bayeux Tapestry tells a story about conquest. Theatrically lit and projected onto a dark blue wall so that it glows like a screen in a dark room, its curators have created an impressive visual spectacle that would replicate well on phone screens. Which is a smart decision, because it’s actually disappointing.

A Year in Normandy expresses a theory favored by Hockney, which is that the one-point perspective of what we call “realistic” painting does not describe the way people see. This sounds vague, but it can be easily proven. You’re reading The Guardian, and you’re probably near a potted plant. Close your right eye and look at it. Now close your left and do the same. You will have seen two different images through two ‘windows’ on the world; When both are open, your brain fuses their images together to create a seamless composite. Unlike cameras, we do not see from one vantage point in isolated moments, but are always integrating information – from different perspectives, and memorizing it – to create the illusion of narrative continuity. Hockney works with this idea to construct a “multi-window” perspective of the landscape, consisting of multiple moments in space and time.

They are all interesting in the abstract. But the revelation that every image is a construction only matters if the painter is able to make you believe in his image. And I can’t believe this picture. It’s undone by detail: the connections between each painting are gratuitously messy, the loud colors resist even the most strenuous efforts to coordinate them, and the occasional gentle touches—shimmering reflection, a veil of lilac rain—can’t escape the constraints of the medium. This artist cannot escape his own spring mood, which gives even the fallen trees that slightly cold impression of prospect that heralds spring. The bigger problem, however, is the artificiality of the image: by rejecting the ‘mechanical’ perspective to which photographs have accustomed us, Hockney veered into an equally artificial ‘pictorial’ method. Taken as a whole, the work resembles nothing so much as Normandy through a digital filter trained on virtually every painting made in the region between 1880 and 1940, from Monet’s poplars to Raoul Dufy’s wheat fields.

The most successful works in the exhibition, by a wide margin, are two self-portraits that demonstrate the close attention that acrylic painting requires and that personal relationships facilitate. Hockney’s partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, was apparently caught looking from his phone. His expression is both sarcastic and condescending, suggesting that he only agreed to sit for this photo under duress and on the condition that he could respond to his emails. It calls to mind Hockney’s famous 1977 photograph of his parents, in which his father, bored with the process, immersed in a book, while his mother looks loyally and lovingly towards the easel. The second portrait of the artist’s nephew, though less convincing, offers further glimpses into Hockney’s ability to conjure a character charged with affection.

But even these images are marred by the placement of their subjects on tables displayed in sharp, distracting reverse perspective. Not so much nods to Van Gogh and Cézanne as violent kicks to the viewer’s legs, these tables appear again in five “paintings within paintings.” Besides clarifying the tired point that all Painting has elements at once abstract and representational, and this treatment of artworks as arguments or guessing games seems to me to betray Hockney’s connections with audiences that go far beyond those who, to paraphrase Baudelaire, go to the Tate and stand in front of masterpieces just so they can believe themselves intellectuals.

The true connoisseurs, the people who Hockney’s work has always admired, are those who can find beauty in everything that surrounds them. When I leave the Serpentine Gallery, the sun has broken through the morning clouds and Kensington Gardens is in bloom. Spring has arrived, as he has been threatening to do for several paragraphs, and the wildly flowering magnolia tree on the gallery path seems completely unconcerned that it might seem derivative or farcical to passing art critics. The lesson of Hockney’s best work remains the same: even in these deeply depressing times, we should be allowed to enjoy the world.

• David Hockney: A Year in Normandy and Some Other Thoughts on Painting, running at the North Serpentine, London, from 12 March to 23 August