I could write poems about what she does with bare legs, especially knees. If this all sounds pious, it isn’t: Packer is first and foremost a wonderful painter. One, called ‘Say Her Name’, is an exquisite funerary bouquet, painted to memorialise another African-American woman, Sandra Bland, who died in police custody in Texas in 2015. Her own still lifes here - gorgeous, wilder than Fantin-Latour and supremely delicate - attempt to answer that question. ![]() Packer tells that she saw some Fantin-Latour still lifes at New York’s Met and wondered how floral paintings could be more suggestive of humaneness than human portraits. Watch: Alastair Campbell’s Newsnight meltdownĪnd then there are the flowers. He can’t breathe and it ain’t just because of the weather. I looked again at the black man on the couch, head thrown back and struggling for air. There are saucepans, an iron, a potted plant - and bullets whirring overhead. The interior Packer depicts draws on photographs of the African-American woman’s home. The title of the painting, commissioned for this show, refers to the killing by police of Breonna Taylor in March 2020 in her home in Louisville, Kentucky. But then I read the title - ‘Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!)’ (2020) - and the sun fell out of the sky. He has a towel across his otherwise bare body and the fan is working overtime. On a vast, lemon-sunny canvas, a man lies stupefied on a couch in an apartment. Thank you, Jennifer Packer, for bringing to a rain-lashed London July a 3 x 4.38m vision of proper summer. That said, this show is the most pleasurable painting exhibition I’ve seen in ages. Thank you, Jennifer Packer, for a vision of summer The most pleasurable painting show I’ve seen in ages. The show is called The Eye is not Satisfied with Seeing and Packer is not in the business of giving us only what we want. Packer doesn’t roll that way: she gives her subjects the dignity of privacy. Art is part of this rapacious age, turning subjects into a mere feast for the eyes. How do you confer privacy on your sitter when you’re revealing them warts and all? Packer’s principled reticence about her sitters is an especially odd and valuable impulse in the 21st century when everything and everyone is an object of consumption. ![]() ‘When I painted Eric, I wanted accuracy, but I also wanted to privilege his subjectivity and privacy,’ says Packer.īut doing that is a tricky thing for a painter to attempt. He might be thinking about what’s for tea, the crisis in pictorial representation or, quite likely, nodding off. Like the ‘Mona Lisa’, Eric’s expression is inscrutable. He’s wearing excellent odd socks, one pink to rhyme with his shoes, the other yellow matching his trousers and chair.īut it’s Eric’s face that’s most compelling. Mack sits on a yellow chair that might have been borrowed from Van Gogh’s bedroom. In Jennifer Packer’s portrait of her friend and fellow artist, Eric N.
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