David Hockney's "Fresh Flowers"

I saw an exhibition of David Hockney's early work in a local library last year. I seem to recall it consisting of woodcuts or inky etchings of some kind, brutal dark lines and energetic scrawls simultaneously blessed with a simply naivety and an unsettling darkness. I think they depicted some of the grimmer Grimm's fairy tales, on one level childishly straightforward and yet with more than a passing shadow of something very sinister, a real fear running with the flow of the ink. "Fresh Flowers", the Hockney exhibition currently on show in Paris, could not be more different in many ways. For a start there is no ink, for each of the pictures has been created using the Brushes app for iPhone and iPad. These electronic pictures are also a riot of bright colours, screaming out in all their backlit, screen-filling glory. The distinctively simple Hockney style, however, has definitely been retained.

It is quite unsettling to be confronted with rows of screens in a gallery instead of canvases, perhaps more so when one has to be reminded not to touch them. Touch is what these gadgets are all about. It is the iPhone and iPad's reason for being. To see these devices nailed to a wall, almost crying out to be interacted with, and yet to know that playing with them is forbidden seems wrong. Yet through their constantly changing, cycling screens they gradually start to draw you into their world in a new way and you come resigned to just looking, accepting what is presented to you.

Movement in exhibitions is nothing new, of course. We have become accustomed to installations, physical or even on videos. Screens have been out there for a while, even if they are not in every gallery space as the central object of our desire to visit such places. There have even been journeys in sound and space contributing to the wide expanses of contemporary art. In Paris, though, one of the most attractive things about the iDisplays was the opportunity they offered for deconstructing the artist's craft. Some of the iPads showed the brush strokes - or should that be finger strokes or maybe artistic touches? - gradually building up, at first incoherent, then slowly forming a recognisable image. How appropriate that an interactive piece of technology should be able to involve us in the creative process in this way, even if we were not permitted to physically touch and participate in the work. We could see the process by which the image came into being, which was something that felt very new and refreshing.

The technology enabled the viewer to gain a new perspective on the creation of an artwork. It also encouraged further consideration of Hockney's work as a whole. Looking at the bright, bold, screenbound daubings, flower pictures in primary colours and simple scenes, it would be easy to dismiss them as the work of someone getting to grips with a new method. Perhaps there is an element of this, but there is more to discover. Yes, a lot of the works are almost basic, the sweeps of the finger giving rise to broad swathes of colour, always vibrant and so very, very bright, a brightness beyond the backlight even. There is little to soothe the eyes here, but a consideration of the trajectory between the black and white lines of Hockney's youth and the screaming pixels of his contemporary work reveals a common thread of to-the-point expression. A few simple scrapes in wood and a few dashes of a finger across a screen produce the same effect - the subtle curve of a petal or the searing beam of light emitting from a lamp against a dark background. Using the minimal amount of artistic faffing about Hockney creates light and shade, contour, shape and expression. It is profoundly honest art, be it in traditional media or in something completely and utterly new, a form at the cutting edge.

My favourite pictures were still life representations of lamps and candles, shining out in dark rooms. I loved the way in which light was drawn, reaching out into the unlit space, moving out, onwards and forwards. Now we have light instead of flat, dull canvas. This is the age of light, backlit screens and a constantly forward moving dynamism, learning from the past but in constant motion towards the future. And so David Hockney moves forward and turns his well-honed techniques into something futuristic, with the help of a few modern gadgets. The exhibition was accompanied by a video montage showing Hockney working on an iPad, clearly delighting in what he was accomplishing and in the sheer novelty of the project - the only exhibition where he had sent all of his work to the gallery via email. Thinking back to those early fairytale works of his, we can see that each simple mark on paper encapsulated a raw emotion, a spark of something in its most basic form, namely fear. Now, it seems, each simple stroke of finger on screen encapsulates something equally raw and pared back, but now that emotion is pure joy.

"Fresh Flowers" is at La Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent until January 30th 2011.

Monet at the Grand Palais

Life today has become so saturated with superlatives that when something is described as a "once in a lifetime" experience it is all too easy to be skeptical. When newspaper columnists wrote of the monumental scale and unique viewing opportunities presented by the Monet exhibition currently being staged at the Grand Palais in Paris, one couldn't help but think their words no more than overenthusiastic marketing hyperbole. Yet seeing beyond the spin there was still a magnetic pull, a recognition that an awful lot of Monet paintings in one place might be a pleasurable thing to go and see. And thus I went.

It does indeed do the soul good to see such an abundance of colour and shifting light as a contrast to January's leaden grey skies and chill winds. Even images of a magpie in the snow and icebergs in the Seine were imbued with such attractive depth by Monet's brush that they provoked more of a warm glow than a frosty shiver. Monet's paintings reward careful, measured perusal, each one displayed in the Grand Palais in its carefully organised place, taking up position in the well-ordered spread of the artist's career. In each individual one you could find something to admire, something beautiful.

The sheer scale of the exhibition did not detract from the uniquely beautiful elements of each component painting, but it was the enormity of this undertaking to gather so many Monet works in one place at one time that gave the whole experience its powerful undercurrent of constantly present awe. It was the artist's habit to pay great attention to detail, often painting on a number of canvases simultaneously to create many different views of the same scene. He moved from canvas to canvas to capture subtle shifts in light or weather. All of these differing views were presented side by side in Paris, a remarkable thing considering the fact that the individual paintings now reside out there in our contemporary global village, many thousands of miles apart. So the viewer is faced with a sight that has not been seen for decades - storm tossed tempest alongside tranquil mirror sea, late afternoon sun on a haystack beside the same haystack in the pink morning dawn, a painting usually now in Melbourne reunited with its companion piece that has been hanging alone in St. Petersburg. I almost had to pinch myself to prove that it was real. There were paintings grouped together that clearly belonged together, documenting the way Monet worked and making clear all that he wanted to achieve with his art, yet they were together here, now and only briefly. The chance to see them displayed in this manner really did seem to be a "once in a lifetime" opportunity.

Seeing key works side by side provided an insight into the mind of Monet and his motivations, whilst seeing the full array of his paintings throughout his life demonstrated the development of his artistic style. We all know his large scale pieces, impressionist waterlily marvels and Le Dejeuner sur L'herbe, both of which had due prominence in the exhibition. However, the curators had also allowed us to follow Monet's perambulations around France and beyond, taking in his visits and revisits to places, his fresh looks and progressions in outlook and method. In doing so we could come to appreciate how Monet reached his own individual artistic position. His output encompassed portraiture and still life as well as landscapes, shifting gradually with the advancing years from very naturalistic precision to something more... passionate, perhaps, pushing his love of light and its shifting playfulness way out to seek new boundaries and finding a new approach to presenting myriad details. A life's work, all in one place, and the we were carefully led through its twists and turns in a way that allowed us to interpret it, explore it and reach an understanding of it.

Visiting the Monet retrospective at the Grand Palais was a profoundly satisfying experience. The early reviewers of the exhibition were justified in their free-flowing praise. The scale and scope of the show deserved no less. There was no alternative to being there, though. No secondhand review could truly do justice to the immediate moment of being faced with Monet, completely immersed in Monet and the wonders that he lived to produce and yet not floundering in the epic volume of it all. Through careful selection and well ordered presentation the curators seemed to have ensured that each individual visitor could manage to pluck a personal response from the vast array of rich material. Seeing the whole exhibition together one could not help but see real meaning. Appreciating beauty in Monet's work is not difficult, but being gently led towards a deeper understanding of it is something truly monumental.

Monet exhibition website - English version.