VENICE

The ever-prolific and spirited David Hockney has almost wallpapered the gallery with his “Home-Made Prints.” Technically they are a mass of color images he made recently by using a copier as a press into which he tossed methods, from collage to direct printing, and materials as offbeat as modeling clay, mashed into the mechanism to make a little dog.

Thematically this wild potpourri has one binding theme: Los Angeles in the ‘80s is what the French Riviera was in the ‘30s and Hockney is our Picasso and Matisse rolled into one. He brackets Matisse with good-life images of living room and terrace transported from Cannes to Pacific Palisades and with colored shapes as nonchalantly full of joie de vivre as the great “Jazz” series. Where Picasso had fun in a series that reduced a bull to an abstraction, Hockney puns on an escalation of the word “Goodbye”--ephemeral funk of Lotusland romance.

The show is such a hoot and so frankly minor that one feels a perfect twerp to derive a serious thought from it. But it is there. Hockney is not Matisse or Picasso (nor would he claim to be) because he invents nothing here. His use of the copier is no more original than his Polaroid photocollages. As a celebrity artist and a virtuoso he calls attention to known techniques when he uses them so adroitly.

Here Hockney is more like Saul Steinberg without the bile. He does not invent, he comments. All to the good. But it’s been a long time since we’ve seen Hockney as anything other than a lighthearted theater designer and virtuoso dabbler. Let’s hope he has some more of those great and psychologically penetrating portraits squirreled away in the studio. (L.A. Louver Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd., to Jan. 3.)