As one visitor said at the opening of David Hockney’s major new show at the Royal Academy, “It warms the heart.”

And so it does. There is nothing here that is carping or glum. Only quiet scenes of nature, and joyous colour, all on a vast scale. The effect is rather like going on a long and pleasant country walk accompanied by an energetic friendly old dog. Except, of course, this friendly old dog keeps stopping to sketch a tree or photograph a winding road.

We could argue that the major flaw in all that is that it results in paintings that are a little tame. Certainly there is nothing here to frighten the soul of Middle England. But perhaps that is the type of art an age of austerity calls for. Not protest paintings or political installations, but something to soothe our troubled souls.

Yet with that suggestion there is the inevitable question. Are these paintings really great works of art as some have suggested? Or are they simply great decoration?

Such is Hockney’s reputation now that I risk real ire from his fan club in even asking this. The assumption will be that I am a Hockney naysayer. But that would be wrong. I did not expect to like Hockney’s latest work, having last seen his ugly and garish stage set designs a few years ago in Saltaire. But I did. 

And although there is crass colour in some of the works at the Academy, the vast majority of Hockney’s recent paintings demonstrate a more sophisticated use of colour which combines with muscular directional brush marks to establish form. The result is that many of the works are really quite satisfying.

That said, Hockney is also an extremely limited artist, particularly when it comes to his ability to define space. Seeing so many of his paintings in one place leaves you painfully aware of this.

Space is invariably very shallow. You can see this when you look at how Hockney paints roads receding into the distance. They only ever gets so far before appearing to rear up. It is rather like seeing a road painted onto the floor of a stage set reach the point where it turns into a road painted onto the backcloth. At the point they join it never quite looks right.

That road motif is also very repetitive in the show, betraying Hockney’s heavy reliance on very simple one point perspective to create space. This might be a legacy of his long-term interest in photography. But one point perspective was quickly abandoned by artists in the Renaissance because it is too predictable, and wholly unlike the complex way in which human beings experience space in the world. In these paintings, Hockney does not make a good case for returning to such simple perspective now.

At times you do feel the aim of the paintings in this show is to decorate the world rather than create space for new worlds to exist. But even with his faults, Hockney is on the side of the angels when it comes to art, and among all this joyous decoration there lurk quite a few gems of art worth seeing.

Michael Paraskos is a writer living in London