“David Hockney, Time Regained” on Arte: a supersensitive painter
As 87-year-old David Hockney is currently being celebrated with a major retrospective at the Fondation Vuitton in Paris, it's interesting to retrace his career through archive images. An outspoken homosexual in England, where it was still a crime, the young painter found his freedom across the Atlantic, where his hedonistic views of Californian swimming pools brought him his first successes. Later, this insatiable experimenter developed a passion for landscapes, capturing the great American outdoors in fascinating assemblages, before returning to his native Yorkshire to capture the passing of time and the changing seasons.
Filmed by Michael Trabitzsch in 2017, before the painter's stay in Normandy, this documentary sheds light on different facets of his personality. His working-class origins would first explain, according to Didier Ottinger, curator of a major Hockney exhibition at the Centre Pompidou , his unwavering attachment to figurative painting, simple in appearance, capable of speaking directly to the heart.
Throughout the sequences, Hockney's loyalty to friendship also shines forth, whether with Jonathan Silver, his childhood friend whom he watched over during his long agony, with the British stylist Celia Birtwell, or with Henry Geldzahler, curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who guided the young David into American art circles. The artist has continued to explore these connections through multiple portraits, always devoted to loved ones, sometimes couples in a setting studded with symbols.
A precocious myopic, forced to observe the world through his eternal round and colored glasses, David Hockney also reveals himself fascinated by optics, the limits of classical perspective. He prefers to multiply the points of view in his compositions to invite the spectator to "walk in the painting" , he says, to enter by one path and exit by another. A generous gesture in the image of this supersensible being.
La Croıx
