Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing
Serpentine Gallery, London

ALTHOUGH Jennifer Packer’s paintings are rarely directly political, the meanings conveyed are profoundly so.

As she hereself says: “My inclination to paint, especially from life, is a completely political one. We belong here. We deserve to be seen and acknowledged in real time. We deserve to be heard and to be imagined with shameless generosity and accuracy.”

Packer paints her friends and family, with whom she has strong emotional bonds. They generously sit for her for many hours, so that they collaborate in the making of the paintings, which in turn honour them.

In an era in which so many young artists turn to photographic sources for their imagery, Packer is unusual in working almost wholly directly from her subjects. This demands a thorough command of drawing and also of past art. Packer has both.

Her influences range from Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Giorgio Morandi and Philip Guston to her fellow African-American Kerry James Marshall, among many others. But she says it was seeing Michelangelo da Caravaggio’s paintings in Roman churches which led her to become a painter. She profoundly admires his “endeavouring to capture humaneness.”

Often facing us, Packer’s life-size, single figures confront us directly. They engage their gaze with ours, asserting their humanity and their presence in the world as black citizens of America. No way will these men and women kowtow or cower to the white masters as their ancestors were forced to.

Their facial expressions and postures are too complex and multilayered to be pinned down in simple terms but they never smile, simper or put on airs and graces as in conventional portraiture. Their gaze is steady, intelligent and occasionally accusatory; never coy, their postures are relaxed as if among family or friends.

Tobi of 2019 crouches in an armchair reading from a book propped up on his knees. The forms are delineated with confident, fluid brushstrokes yet previous false starts are retained. This gives the painting immediacy and ambiguity as well as honesty about the underlying process from which it sprang.

Whereas many painters excel either in drawing or in the use of colour, Packer excels equally in both. The reds, pinks, ochres, golds and siennas create a study of the warm end of the palette which may suggest movement, joy or levity.

Yet this is contradicted by Tobi’s intense facial expression and the stillness of the compact oblong formed by his posture conveys his concentrated intellectual engagement.

As in Tobi, Packer often explores the gamut of possibilities within a single dominant colour. April Restless of 2017 forms a symphony of yellows with touches of red, sienna and green against the white of primed canvas.

The subject is seated in front of a work table adorned with the clutter of creativity: scissors, pens, brushes, a small typewriter and a vase of flowers. Face, hands, knees and feet are delicately delineated, yet April’s torso is barely indicated and the surrounding canvas is left bare.

The sitter’s restlessness is expressed by the contradiction between the highly finished hands, face, one leg and the exquisitely painted bouquet of flowers with the sections of primed canvas left casually bare.

April’s expression is difficult to pin down — complex and ambiguous, serious but hesitant, focused but baffled — it is impossible to say for certain.

Wearing casual sports wear, Packer’s figures are as comfortable in their track suits, hoodies, shorts, sneakers, trainers or socks as with their own bodies and with Packer painting them, since they know each other so well. The emotional /resonance between sitter and painter is palpable. The figures have such presence as human beings that the memory of them lingers long after seeing the paintings .
Packer is a serious artist intent on producing emotionally and politically engaged work who is refreshingly unconcerned with slick gimmicks or with gaining superficial notoriety. She has important things to say and does so with an impressive command of her medium.

Go if you can, as no reproduction can truly convey the power of her paintings. They are an important political contribution to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The exhibition is free and runs until August 22, opening times: serpentinegalleries.org.