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.