Art Review : Hockney Puts a Different Angle on Abstract Cubism

David Hockney’s art masks deep feeling behind lighthearted surfaces. His current exhibition in the sleek new quarters of the L.A. Louver Gallery constitutes the most copious presentation of his work since his 1988 retrospective at the L.A. County Museum of Art. This is hardly a comparable event, but, with 50 pieces on view, it’s not chopped liver, either.

Works fall into three unevenly divided groups--intimate paintings of the artist’s two pet dachshunds, pencil drawings of friends and seven abstract canvases that he calls “Some Very Large New Paintings.”

The irritation ignited by this cloying title is compounded by the name of one of the big pictures. How could a grown man get so cute as to call his painting “Snail’s Space”? The only thing more annoying than experiencing a bad pun is realizing it’s an accurate one. At that point one’s aggravation, perforce, turns to admiration. “Snail’s Space” is a continuation--and probably a culmination--of Hockney’s lifelong rumination on the art of Picasso.

About 1914, after Picasso and Braque invented rigorous Analytic Cubism, Picasso moved on to Synthetic Cubism by including amorphous, flat, colored shapes, sometimes covered with pointillist polka-dots. Most observers took these works to be merely decorative. But, in his big paintings, Hockney seems to have asked himself whether Picasso’s versions might also be structural.

Hockney’s answer is in the affirmative. He creates an ambiguous but inescapable sense of slowly meandering labyrinthine space. In scale, Hockney’s space is almost microscopic. In short, it’s the perfect visualization of moving at a snail’s pace in a snail’s space. What an extremely droll and deft solution to an arcane academic problem that at least 50 people will find absolutely fascinating.

Is that all there is? We’re now two historic generations away from Cubism. Everything it represented seems to belong to the past. Isn’t an exercise like this rather pointless?

I don’t think so. “Snail’s Space” is a superbly realized painting for painting’s sake, like a symphony that constantly reinvents its own harmonics. Measuring 7 by 20 feet, it is nearly the size of Picasso’s 1937 “Guernica,” echoing that masterpiece’s horizontal format.

If Picasso was up to anything in that great painting, it was to prove that Cubism was capable of saying something about real life in a big way. It’s hard to avoid a hunch that Hockney, here, wants to demonstrate that Cubism still has something to say about real life.

“Snail’s Space” looks like an inner landscape, the artist’s visualization of the path of life. If that’s the case, then life, according to Hockney, is a tortured way full of curves that turn back on themselves, meaningless except in the beauty of its own absurdity. It takes great courage to admit to such a vision. But it can’t be easy to live with. Where does one find solace?

Well, among the kinds of friends drawn here. Hockney’s always been a first-rate draftsman, but now the pencil probes harder into character, forms lean to German Expressionism. There’s great affection for the sitters--the lovably embarrassed sister, the loose-jawed doctor who seems about to tell a really funny story. But there is no flinching in these drawings, no ironic avoidance. Everybody is getting older. There are shrewd eyes, weary mouths, skepticism, vanity and a capacity for meanness. Is there anyone to love unguardedly?

Absent children, the natural object of our sappier affections are pets. Hockney’s two dozen doting little paintings of his matched dachshunds were done quickly, from life. They carry that spontaneous warmth everybody feels seeing their animal safely asleep in some abandoned and voluptuous posture or showing gratitude that seems to prove they love us too. Even here, though, Hockney’s sharp observation avoids the hokey.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., through May 6, closed Sunday and Monday, (310) 822-4955.

Artistic Passion: John Millei counts high among that embarrassingly copious battalion of gifted L.A. artists who don’t get the attention they deserve. A small but pungent installation of three large paintings at Ace gallery does what all his shows do. It proves this is an artist whose reach never seems to exceed his grasp.

Basically Millei is a Neo-Abstract Expressionist. He’s done muscular, mysterious black-on-black compositions, pristine ruminations on white and happy riffs in color. He has the kind of passion you find among jazz musicians with their love for its lore and their conviction that it’s a classic form you can’t wear out.

Millei’s ‘50s-style romanticism has never been clearer than in this work. It’s titled “Ni-Be-Fe” after the compressed names of three important women in his life. Painting them, he seems to have taken on the persona of a bold 16th-Century Japanese painter-poet and combined it with the Zen character of L.A.’s Light and Space art of the ‘70s.

Each composition is vertical, resembling a Japanese screen with a metallic background. Millei has swapped the traditional gold for a hipper dulled aluminum. Markings are economical, like splattered blossoms suggesting a haiku verse to each of his loves. One has delicate green petals casually garlanded among lavender shapes evoking someone fresh and exotic. Next comes a brown root ball with red satellites calling up a love of earthy and dramatic character. Finally there is the wistfulness of a near-empty space scattered with the shy apricot blooms of unrequited desire.

They add up to a perfect lyric for a nice spring day.

* Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., through April 29, closed Sunday and Monday, (213) 935-4311.