David Hockney, Annely Juda, London, review: Many of these iPhone and iPad drawings are little more than casual crowd-pleasers

You can see Hockney at it from time to time at press conferences, drawing on his iPhone for light relief perhaps, a little welcome distraction from all the jaw-jaw. There's nothing quite like relaxing into what you have always really wanted to do with your life. He has embraced the iPad too for the sake of the bigger picture.

We've seen these iPad and iPhone works in countless shows, for more than a decade. It's a way of seizing the everyday in all its pleasing, blowing-by fleetingness, of reprising old themes in slightly different ways, of seeing his own face as age withers it.

The question is this though. Does the iPhone really extend the expressive possibilities for a painter as long practised as this man? (He's in his eighties now). Yes and no.

These devices rhyme with Hockney. He has always wanted to seize the moment, breathlessly; find out what's new out there that he can bend to his will; be there at exactly that moment when the light breaks through. And yet there's nothing very fresh about the subject matter of this new show.

Still lives of flowers. His own face. The Eiffel Tower. Fragments of everyday domesticity: the bathrobe on the back of the door; the trousers flung over the chair. Oranges in a bowl. Fag butts in an ashtray.

The iPhone does limit the possibilities too. There is no melding of colour. There is only ever layering, which can be quite crude, because you can often see right through from the point at which it all began to where it finally sputtered to a close. There is also that quick, riddly spikiness of line. And a certain unsharp fumeyness. Those two elements – the fumey and the finicky – can be good neighbours when they are not falling out. Both things happen here.

The colours are often good – bouncy, springy, clashy syncopations of brightness. Patterning and mark-making come together – in fact, work against each other – very well in that scene of fag butts. The view of the Eiffel Tower is much below par: those meshings which suggest the structure of the tower are far too casually flicked down for words; the yellow cupola of the Invalides looks casually syrupy.

Some good works here then, but many of them little more than fairly casual crowd-pleasers, and for sale in multiples too to those who still yearn to acquire a bit of – what was the phrase? – Hockney, our greatest living painter.

'David Hockney iPhone and iPad drawings 2009-2012 and new photgraphic drawings', Until 31 August (annelyjudafineart.co.uk)