Pedro Paricio and David Hockney

Hockney’s landscapes are vistas seen through the window of a moving vehicle, capturing the quintessential Los Angeles driving experience. Testament to Hockney’s innovative spirit, his depictions of the Hollywood Hills are experiments with dynamic perspective. His stylistic evolution in the 1980s resulted from his renewed understanding of Cubism and his engagement with Chinese scroll painting, which provided an antidote to the static effect of single-point perspective, which he felt alienated the viewer from the composition. This in turn inspired Hockney’s Moving Focus print series, which aimed to capture the experience of looking from shifting vantage points.

Hockney’s relentless experimentation in painting and printmaking inspired subsequent generations of artists, including Paricio. The contemporary Spanish artist’s prismatic paintings contain a Hockney-esque ambition to capture the experience of looking. Paricio reinterprets Hockney’s Californian panoramas using his unique visual vocabulary: colourful designs are his signature motif, filling familiar silhouettes and landscapes with geometric patterns. The artist encourages the viewer to participate in the act of creation, completing details with the mind’s eye: ‘What I want is that you finish completing the work,’ Paricio explains, ‘It is like a kind of trio, me, the painting and you.’

Hockney’s freedom in mark-making and his sensitivity to shifts in light and colour are reminiscent of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Yet in contrast to the en plein air approach pioneered by his Impressionist forebears, Hockney painted the Hollywood Hills and the Pacific Coast Highway from memory, reconstructing space across time in a subjective manner. Although he lived in the hills, his studio was located on the flats of Santa Monica Boulevard: this daily journey downhill through the serpentine roads inspired his sweeping vistas of Mulholland Drive, Nichols Canyon and the Pacific Coast Highway, all of which were reimagined by Paricio. For Hockney, painting from memory resulted in a blurring of the line between reality and fantasy, translating the physical landscape into an expansive mental one. In a similar manner, Paricio’s visual journey into Hockney’s landscapes is complex and layered, conceived through multiple prisms of perception and reinterpretation.

Hailing from the island of Tenerife, Paricio’s art is also informed by a connection to the natural landscape, in this case the rugged volcanic terrain and vibrant colours of his homeland. Like Hockney, his artistic practice is enlivened by the psychogeography of a place. Paricio has primarily explored portraiture throughout his oeuvre, but his recent Master Landscapes series (2024), focuses on refiguring Hockney’s landscapes from the 1980s and 1990s. Hockney’s patchwork panoramas are well suited to Paricio’s kaleidoscopic patterns, which traverse the line between the figurative and the abstract. The sunny environs of the Canary Islands and mainland Spain, where Paricio lived and studied, no doubt influenced his consistently vivid colour palette.

In the same vein, following Hockney’s prodigal return to the UK in the 1990s, the brilliant sunlight and intense hues of Southern California were injected into his joyous paintings of Yorkshire and his luminous iPad drawings of Woldgate Woods. In a similar manner, while his art is distinctly contemporary, Paricio is always conscious of his roots, both art historical and personal: ‘In my home island of Tenerife’, the artist explains, ‘we have a saying about our big volcanic peak, Mount Teide: no matter how hard you try to get away from it, Teide is always still there.’

The curvilinear rhythms of Hockney’s 1990s Snails Space print series evoke his earlier paintings of the Hollywood Hills, where uniform gridlines of the city contrast with the winding roads and verdant foliage of his neighbourhood. Here, he transforms the art historical tradition of landscape painting into simplified geometric abstraction, revitalising the genre. These prints correlate with his designs for opera stage sets in the 1970s and 1980s; an experience which shaped his attitude towards perspective. As a result, these works are imbued with a sense of theatricality, with large-scale versions of his 1995 Snails Space works being converted into stage sets, heightened by Vari-lite automatic lighting systems to create a dynamic, immersive work.

The culmination of this ambition to capture the drama of nature is his famous ‘Wagner drive’, a 90-minute synesthetic experience which involved sunset drives with his friends through the hills and canyons surrounding Los Angeles, set to the music of Richard Wagner. Many of Hockney’s prints relate in some way to the stage: his Eine, Deux, Très series was inspired by a performance of Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Royal Opera House, while his Moving Focus series, particularly his prints of Hotel Acatlán, appear like an expansive stage set, with their hand-painted frames further blurring the boundaries of reality.

By reinventing the familiar topography of Hockney’s landscapes, Paricio is engaging with the long tradition of appropriation in the history of painting. Hockney has also established a dialogue with his artistic predecessors, particularly Hobbema, Van Eyck and Picasso, the latter being an artist who has strongly influenced Paricio as well. Both Hockney and Paricio pay homage to the rich history of artists and poets who not only draw inspiration from the landscape, but also shape our perception of an environment.

Both artists reinvigorate the paintings they draw inspiration from, adopting contemporary styles and even cutting-edge mediums. For instance, Hockney’s recent use of the iPad and its software Brushes, has been most significant in his landscapes. Allowing him to work quickly and add visible layers, the iPad drawings document the changing of the seasons in a similar manner to the Impressionists over a hundred years ago. Hockney has reflected on the power of the iPad as an artistic medium: ‘Picasso would have gone mad with this… So would Van Gogh. I don’t know an artist who wouldn’t, actually.’