![]() ![]() The 2012 diptych Fire Next Time refers to James Baldwin’s 1963 book of essays, and, again, opens up a view of a large interior. The earliest painting here is a kind of premonition of the last. Breonna Taylor was killed by police in a cascade of shots that went through a patio door into her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky in March this year. Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!), is at once compelling and disquieting, in many ways the best thing here. Nothing is happening but the air sifting about, the weight of the light in the room, the man not moving. The scene doesn’t want me, but it sucks me in. I find myself both inhabiting this room and feeling awkward and out of place. Looking around Packer’s enormous painting, I find I’m holding my breath, my eye alighting here, then there. Unless, that is, it is not a window at all but a painting-within-a-painting. A blue jay flies in a patch of blue sky at the window up the stairs, with something in its beak. So your eye ranges the room instead, the things coming in and out of focus: the galley kitchen behind him, an iron resting on the counter beside the hob, a row of kitchen knives hanging from a magnetic rail on the tiles, a fan thrumming the air, a lowered blind. A stare might wake him, somehow aware he’s being looked at. Topless, a towel draped over his waist, his far leg raised, a hand on his leg, a white bandage on his calf. The world leaks in to her studio in the Bronx, as something more than background noise.Ī man is sleeping, or drowsing, or just thinking, lain out on his couch, unaware of being looked at. The relationships she paints are more the ones between sitter and painter, or her subjects and the viewer. ![]() ![]() Friendships and losses and the everyday are all in there. They keep returning, among the paintings of empty beds and Packer’s friends, a game of pool, a man in his cluttered studio. Packer’s flower paintings are memento mori for the named and the unnamed, and punctuate all the figures, portraits and rooms in her Serpentine Gallery show. Say Her Name is a funerary bouquet for Sandra Bland, found hanged in her cell in a Texas jail while in police custody in 2015. The titles of these flower paintings tell us that they are more than nature studies. Outwardly conventional – this is their disguise – the 36-year-old Black American’s oil-painted portraits, flower paintings and interiors creep up on you time and again.įlowers smudge the foliage in Packer’s still lifes, the small canvases filled with greenery and darkness and sobriety. His bulk and body language dwarf the chair, his stillness unnerving. This incidental detail lightens the mood, gives you something else to look at beside the guy in the chair who evidently has things on his mind. In another painting, the zipper of a leather jacket strewn on the sofa makes an arabesque of tiny white dots beside a pensive man whose downcast eyes stare at the floor or at something unseen. Freely sits, legs together, in a kind of yellowish haze. A portable typewriter on poet April Freely’s desk, with keys that look like rows of worn-down teeth (I think of a voice, clattering), a crocodile clip beside it, holding papers I can’t quite read. The artist Eric Mack (one of several frequent models), his ankles revealing odd socks, carefully chosen. The pair of white stereo speakers on the floor nearby, with the tangle of white wires between them. The woman whose legs are drawn up on to the chair, her red and white sneakers casually dangling. I’m drawn to the details in Jennifer Packer’s paintings. ![]()
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