David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life review – 'We can feel Hockney's deafness'

Royal Academy, London
The artist’s humorous portraits, all with the same yellow chair, are a superheated pageant of fashion and pattern

David Hockney is a relentlessly experimental artist, in the original sense of the word experiment, which means the testing of truth against experience. The artist is interested in how we see and how we can adequately record the evidence of our eyes. His restless quest for visual truth has led him from cubist photomontages to plein-air paintings – and now to an intriguing exploration of the nature of portraiture, in which 82 different people all pose in the same elegant chair, perching, sprawling or slumping themselves on its lemon upholstery, faces ruddy or pale, accepting the scrutiny of his pencil and paintbrush.

What is it, in the 21st century, to have your portrait painted? It is for one thing a gloriously archaic exercise, a few hours of escape from the speed of modern life. Just do it, says the slogan on Avner Chaim’s green T-shirt, under his striped purple zip-up jacket, yet he’s been taken out of the rush of the big city, sat in Hockney’s old-fashioned chair, and must wait for the artist to do his work.

Related: Is David Hockney right to say painting is an old man's art?

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