Venice

New paintings by David Hockney are essentially refinements on what has come before. There are portraits galore of friends and family, now presented in strips and grids of multiple images (a spinoff from the artist’s habit of hanging up his laser prints one next to the other for scrutiny in the studio). There are jaunty, fairy-tale-like Malibu landscapes, rambunctiously patterned interiors and small set pieces of potted plants. And there is a sampling of the new fax works, fanciful black-and-white images pieced together from numerous sheets of drawings fed through a fax machine.

In paintings, an individual brush stroke becomes a visual synecdoche--one swipe of paint standing in for a larger whole that needn’t be painstakingly represented. The rhythmic peaking, curling and tilting of ocean waves is reduced to a faultless formula. Stripes on shirts, locks of hair, the pulling and sagging of facial skin seem intensely active in the portraits, in contrast to the immobile, beady luminosity of the sitters’ eyes. This approach gently and gracefully reminds the viewer that the paintings are ultimately artifice.

Interiors are no different, with their skewed perspectives, curiously expressive furniture (Hockney’s furniture tends to assume a posture, as people do) and rampant design. Sometimes patterning breaks down into watery, barely touched traces of the brush; alternately, it’s teasingly just that much removed from plausibly imitating a surface texture. The only real throw-away pieces are the little still lifes--too prosaic even in Hockney’s cozy terms--and, of course, the faxes. (L.A. Louver, 55 Venice and 77 Market, to Jan. 6.)