The painting crackles and glows, red to orange. In the panoramic painting Fire Next Time, named after James Baldwin’s classic essays on American racism, a hooded figure slumps over a table in temperatures a puny electric fan can do nothing to diminish. In another, a figure all at sea in darkness may be swimming, or possibly drowning: a knotted rope waits to be grasped, but salvation hangs in the balance. Photograph: © 2020 Jennifer PackerĪ charcoal drawing shows one black man on the shoulders of another, nearly toppling but held upright by Packer’s piercingly precise contours. Say Her Name, 2015, a tribute to Sandra Bland, who died in police custody that year. Packer’s painting becomes a deathless tribute. The picture is titled Say Her Name, a hashtag that blossomed after the death of Sandra Bland, the African American woman who died in police custody in 2015. But the glow of pale blooms in funereal darkness has a solemnity that implies something more enduring than a bouquet. The old genres are like a traditional proscenium arch theatre, it seems, in which Packer performs her seductive new plays.Ī loose spray of flowers – roses, irises – looks a little like late Manet. And so it is too with her still lifes of flowers, and the vast scenes for which she has acquired an international reputation, conflating portraiture with history painting. Her portraits are watchful, quizzical and profound, extending respect to every sitter.
Jennifer Packer was born in Philadelphia 36 years ago, and lives and works in the Bronx. Packer is a painter of abundant gifts, and an ever-changing approach to every new subject What you see is something like an internal dialogue. It is more that the connection runs deep. It is not that the portrait is private far from it, all the observations and effects are openly declared, from the strong hands to the gorgeously patterned socks, like a rich Matisse vignette. There is such a shrewd intelligence in her eyes, and the look she exchanges with Packer, as if they were sharing ideas. She wears aviator specs, their steel frames incised into the paint with the handle of the brush, eyebrows sceptically arched above.
The New York artist Tschabalala Self appears twice in a single painting, like successive images in a flick-book, shifting about like one of the energetic female figures in her own art.Īnd the portrait that opens this revelatory exhibition is of a woman named Tia, leaning against a pillow, knees comfortably raised. The poet April Freely turns away from her typewriter to sit as still as she can for Packer: restless, waiting, fingertips twitching in a shining yellow aura. Even if you didn’t know it, you would immediately perceive the intimacy between Packer and the circle of people she paints in this show. The portrait seems to partake of its subject’s pensiveness.Įric Mack is a painter too, and a friend of the black American artist Jennifer Packer.
Everything is at once so distinct, from Eric’s sidelong gaze, to the stiff folds of his jacket, and yet so abstracted. Objects seem to drift around him like figments in the ambient glow of the studio, or perhaps it’s the atmosphere of the painting itself, with its veils of gold and ochre. He wears conspicuously odd socks and purple laced shoes. Eric leans back in his chair, lost in thought, posing for the painter.
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