Venice

One look at a first solo show of paintings by Ian Falconer and you don’t need to be told that he admires David Hockney.

Falconer’s works--depicting cozy living rooms, pianos and primitive, gutsy nudes (often no more than a Gertrude Steinish nose and flesh-colored cables reposing on stripes, as in “Boy Reading on Striped Couch”)--owe an unconcealed debt to both Hockney and Hockney’s stylistic mentor Picasso.

Like Picasso, Falconer reinterprets observation into a puzzle-piece reality distorted by simultaneous viewpoints, anatomical dislocations and quick unedited abbreviations of shape. From Hockney, Falconer brings the understanding that to distort line you first have to master it, which he has done in a tight, realistically drafted portrait of curator Henry Geldzahler.

The good news is that to a great extent Falconer is moving on his own steam. Where Cubism was always tied to a shallow, flat space, Falconer stuffs his squat acrobatic figures into tough-to-figure spatial compartments. “Reclining Nude, View From Feet” is a drastically--though not logically--foreshortened figure with its knees pulled to its chin as if the bottoms of its green feet were pressing on an invisible picture plane. Where the structural mainstay for Cubism is line, Falconer lets wedges of color lock in playful shapes (“Young Man With Skateboard” and the fine “Nude From Behind, Looking Over Shoulder”).

Ultimately, this is Picasso of the ‘40s grafted to the lovable hedonism of Southern California in the ‘80s (“Young Man Reclining With Sunburn”); time will tell if Falconer uses his considerable talent and sensitivity to carve his own artistic territory, or rides the tempting wave of any-friend-of-Hockney’s-is-a-friend-of-mine. (L.A. Louver Gallery, 55 N. Venice Blvd., to Sept. 10.)