Hockney & Paricio

When considering the history of modern art, Hockney emerges as a figure virtually synonymous with the motif of the swimming pool. Arriving in Los Angeles in 1964, the sun-drenched affluence of California differed sharply from Hockney’s hometown of Bradford in West Yorkshire. He originally travelled there with the intention of staying for six months but ended up settling there, buying a house in the hills. The brilliance of the Californian light and the intensity of its colours permeated his subsequent paintings. ‘Whenever I left England, colours got stronger in the pictures’, Hockney explained. ‘California always affected me with colour. Because of the light you see more colour… there is more colour in life here.’

In a similar vein, Paricio channels the luminous palette and sunlit terrain of his native Tenerife into his vibrant paintings, often revisiting and reconfiguring the same image in various colourways. In his Pool series, Paricio dives headfirst into one of the most iconic motifs of 20^th century art history. Dazzling reflections dance across the water in Hockney fashion, their fluidity standing in contrast to the rigid, flat blocks of colour found throughout the canvas. The repetition of a striking image in different colourways evokes the seriality of Pop Art, explored by Warhol in his portraits and portfolios of everyday objects. In his Pool paintings, Paricio juxtaposes vivid blues and cool, metallic tones with backgrounds of warm orange, yellow, pink and red, amplifying the feeling of leisure and playfulness that defines a poolside environment. A particularly striking feature is the vacant diving board, rendered in bold geometric patterns which draw the viewer’s attention to the conspicuous absence of human figures. This device echoes the composition of Hockney’s pool paintings of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the diving board symbolises a moment of tension, signalling the potential for action and disruption of what Hockney describes as ‘the surface of the water, the very thin film, the shimmering two-dimensionality.’

Hockney’s lithograph Pool made with Paper and Blue Ink for Book, created in 1980, shows a closely cropped image of a diving board overhanging a vibrant blue swimming pool. The surface of the water shimmers and glistens in the daylight, the sun casting a rippling shadow from the board across the water’s edge. The depth of the pool is suggested through the cross-hatching of darker blue lines, which change direction to imply the bottom of the pool. Meanwhile, broader undulating lines cover the entire surface, suggesting the gentle rippling and movement of the water.

In his pool paintings and lithographs, Hockney engages with the technical challenge of capturing a body of water in motion. As the artist reflected, ‘In the swimming pool pictures, I had become interested in the more general problem of painting the water, finding a way to do it.’ The mutability of water, with its perpetually changing colours, forms and varying levels of transparency, became a graphic challenge for Hockney. He described the dynamic ripples on the surface of water as ‘dancing lines.’ This mark-making may possibly reveal that the pool depicted is, in fact, from Hockney’s own residence at the time, in Montcalm Ave, Los Angeles. In 1979 the artist moved into the property and went about decorating the pool with distinctive semi-circular blue marks similar to those seen in Pool made with Paper and Blue Ink for Book. The close date between the artist arriving at his new residence and the execution of this lithograph, separated by just one year, makes this possibility even more palpable. In a similar manner, Paricio’s approach to painting water captures the motion and fluidity of a swimming pool, albeit using different techniques to Hockney. In his Pool paintings, Paricio applies metallic paint to capture the shimmering ripples on the water’s surface. Visually, this marks a departure from Hockney’s curvilinear ‘dancing lines’, but the striking juxtaposition between straight lines and fluctuating ripples remains.

Paricio has remarked that all of Hockney’s art ‘can be understood as a kind of diary, because if every work is autobiographical – implicitly or explicitly – Hockney’s is a complete logbook, encompassing his travels, his passions, and his loves.’ This notion elucidates Paricio’s engagement with Hockney’s paintings, particularly his reimagining of the seminal 1972 work, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). The original painting was in fact an entirely fabricated and imagined scene assembled from various photographic sources. Reflecting on his painting, Hockney noted: ‘The figures never related to one another, nor to the background. I changed the setting constantly from distant mountains to a claustrophobic wall and back again to mountains.’ While Hockney’s painting is already a carefully constructed composite image, Paricio extends this process of reinvention. Paricio’s Pool with Two Figures on a Landscape (2025) reimagines Hockney’s iconic painting through his own biography and visual language.

The protagonists of Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) are his former partner Peter Schlesinger, who stands fully clothed on the edge of the swimming pool, looking down at an anonymous swimmer submerged beneath the water’s surface. The relationship between these figures is deliberately ambiguous, and the visual separation is clear in the composition. Paricio preserves this sense of disjunction: in his version, the standing figure is reimagined as a woman, her arm extended towards the water in a gesture that implies yearning for connection, in contrast to the passive stance of Hockney’s figure. Both the woman and the swimmer’s body are rendered in Paricio’s signature kaleidoscopic patterns, dissolving the figures into abstraction and obscuring their identities. Paricio’s flattened, two-dimensional style is particularly suited to depicting a refracted body beneath the water’s surface, heightening the visual distortions already present in Hockney’s original painting. The relationship between the two protagonists remains unresolved: the swimmer is suspended between motion and stillness, raising questions about whether they are floating, swimming, or drowning.