Jennifer Packer review: a painter of abundant gifts

Eric leans back in his chair, lost in thought, posing for the painter. He wears conspicuously odd socks and purple laced shoes. 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. Everything is at once so distinct, from Eric’s sidelong gaze, to the stiff folds of his jacket, and yet so abstracted. The portrait seems to partake of its subject’s pensiveness.

Eric Mack is a painter too, and a friend of the black American artist Jennifer Packer. 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 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. 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.

And the portrait that opens this revelatory exhibition is of a woman named Tia, leaning against a pillow, knees comfortably raised. She wears aviator specs, their steel frames incised into the paint with the handle of the brush, eyebrows sceptically arched above. There is such a shrewd intelligence in her eyes, and the look she exchanges with Packer, as if they were sharing ideas. 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. It is more that the connection runs deep. What you see is something like an internal dialogue.

Jennifer Packer was born in Philadelphia 36 years ago, and lives and works in the Bronx. Her portraits are watchful, quizzical and profound, extending respect to every sitter. 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. The old genres are like a traditional proscenium arch theatre, it seems, in which Packer performs her seductive new plays.

A loose spray of flowers – roses, irises – looks a little like late Manet. But the glow of pale blooms in funereal darkness has a solemnity that implies something more enduring than a bouquet. 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. Packer’s painting becomes a deathless tribute.

A charcoal drawing shows one black man on the shoulders of another, nearly toppling but held upright by Packer’s piercingly precise contours. 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. 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. The painting crackles and glows, red to orange. Stairs in the background only lead, it seems, to a fiercer heat.

These are slow-won paintings, the manner of their making episodically apparent in knife scrapes that leave traces of erasure, or solvent-thinned drips of paint down the canvas. The refinement of Packer’s line pins the haziest washes of colour together, summarising a face or a shoe, measuring a frown or the shape of a toe (anatomy and footwear are always superb). These are compelling visions of bodies in motion and – a hand balancing a pool cue with nerveless delicacy, a head on a pillow, tiny but dense with thought and brushwork – yet always with an overwhelming sense of the actual person, of communion between Packer and her fellow human beings.

If that isn’t always obvious in the flower paintings, which are sometimes too lush to carry the emotional or political significance of their titles, it comes to the fore in an enormous canvas tacked to the wall of the central gallery.

A black man in blue shorts lies dreaming, as it seems, on a couch. The scale of the room around him is vast. Here and there are objects, painted like Platonic ideals. An iron, pressed flat, as it were, into its indelible pointed shape; a fan, its wings a fine airy blur. Behind the man, a staircase rises to a high window, framing a jay in its transitory flight against the cobalt sky. There is so much to look at, to dwell upon; and everything in the unhurried deliberation of the painting tells you that it all matters. And sure enough, this is an act of commemoration. Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!) is its title, in memory of Breonna Taylor, the young black woman shot dead in her Louisville apartment by white police officers in March this year.

This is Jennifer Packer’s first European exhibition and it will stand in the memory. She is a painter of abundant gifts, and an ever-changing approach to every new subject. Whenever the restrictions lift, this is a show anyone would want to see, stepping in to the brilliant colour of the Serpentine Gallery from the park outside, where people walk beneath wintry skies among the bare trees: human life deeply celebrated and enlarged.

• Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing is at the Serpentine Gallery until 14 March (temporarily closed)