Jennifer Packer at the Whitney in New York — paintings both decorative and deep

Jennifer Packer’s paintings are exquisite conundrums, opening on to vistas of things unseen. The portraits, so immediate on first impact, quickly dissolve into layers of intricate strokes, then coalesce again. She hides limbs and blurs faces, asking viewers to complete the scene in their imagination. In her world, people stand, sit, or slump on the threshold of disappearance, their presence weighty but fleeting. Enjoy me now, these works implore; to savour the company of loved ones is also to mourn their loss.

Packer’s portraits, now on view at the Whitney Museum in New York in a dazzling solo show, are scrumptiously, indulgently beautiful, a dangerous thing to be. The critical apparatus awards reputational points for dredged-up trauma, troubled self-examination, social or ideological critique — not for the creaminess of sunshine or the brilliance of a patterned sock. “What I hate,” Fairfield Porter once wrote, “is the Puritanical idea that light is of no account, that pleasure condemns you to hell, that life is empty of daily significance.”

In the show, The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing, Packer seduces first and challenges later. Like Vuillard, Matisse and Bonnard, she lingers on the rapture of paint and its luminous possibilities. Also like them, she tempers that sensuality with pain that flits just beneath the surface. Packer’s work is decorative and deep.

This is not just any apartment; it’s the home of Breonna Taylor, whom police shot to death when they raided the place in 2020

“Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!)” (2020) greets visitors at the entrance to the exhibition. Unframed and pinned to the wall like a poster in a college dorm, the monumental canvas opens into a yellow room, awash with light and packed with the specifically banal items that make this an Everyhousehold: a plant, a fan, a smoke alarm, an iron, children’s drawings, a set of knives affixed to a magnet. The furniture is equally familiar, from the wood-grained kitchen cabinet to the tiled backsplash.

We might mistake this for a luminous and inviting domestic tableau at magic hour, when the low sun slides in through the windows. In a Bonnard idyll, the artist’s wife would be stretched out in the bath, haloed in violet and blue. Here, Packer gives us a bare-chested black man, stretched out on the sofa, his nose extended towards the ceiling, a figure in repose or sorrow — it’s impossible to tell which.

This is not just any apartment; it’s the home of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old black woman whom police shot to death when they raided the place in 2020. In the companion audio guide, Packer recounts the impact of the crime scene photographs, the way those ordinary furnishings gave her a sense of kinship with the victim. “I saw things that I recognised, things that I would have seen in my own apartment. I could almost conflate a time in my life materially to what I was seeing in hers. I felt this sense of connection.”

She doesn’t usually rely on photos. For her, coming face to face with a subject causes an alchemical reaction, a current that passes between artist and model, then jumps on to the canvas. For an early portrait, “Jordan” (2014), her fellow student at Yale — and now celebrated artist — Jordan Casteel posed in her studio for two days. Sprawled on the sofa, she merges almost imperceptibly with the room, person and possessions fusing in an apotheosis of amber and rose. “I mimic the surroundings, in the way that I felt that I was becoming quite enmeshed with that space at that time,” Casteel recalls in the audio guide.

That kind of chameleon act is necessarily a collaboration between observer and observed. Packer has talked up the importance of camouflage, the way she lays out objects and people for inspection and conceals them at the same time. She sets up the stage, introduces the players, and proceeds to elide the distinctions between them.

In the dreamlike “Lesson in Longing” (2019), a study in fuchsia, scarlet, and magenta, she weaves a man and a woman into the flickering atmosphere, obscuring their faces but meticulously dwelling on domestic details. Greenery sprouts from a couple of pots, and a hanging plant flings its tendrils into a shower of colour. A purple cat curls up on a cabinet, and you can just make out the head and tail of another. Paint drips in rivulets, reminding us — as if it were possible to forget — that we’re looking at an invention, a world wrought by artifice and imagination.

Her work rises highest where vividness meets ambiguity. In the drawing “The Mind Is Its Own Place” (2020), two male figures wrestle, trying to free themselves — from each other, from two dimensions and from the confining frame. The image fuses mannerist graphic technique with the coiled violence of Goya, raising the question of whether we are supposed to see one man or two. The title, from Milton’s Paradise Lost, suggests a portrait of an internal conflict, two aspects of the same soul locked in permanent struggle. “The mind is its own place, and in itself/can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n,” Milton writes. Or perhaps, in invoking Goya’s “Sleep of Reason”, the drawing suggests a brain haunted by its own dreams.

It must be hard to be a contemporary black painter who is moved to answer ugly acts of violence but is also attracted to flowers. She has returned, wistfully and often, to the bouquets of Henri Fantin-Latour, a subject she long considered unjustifiably trivial. That lust for their luscious beauty embarrassed her — until, haunted by the 2015 death of Sandra Bland in police custody, she started painting funerary bouquets. Her 2017 “Say Her Name” is an elliptical kind of tribute, a finely wrought portrait of flowers that have played their part in honouring memory and are themselves on the way back to dust.

Still life, also known as nature morte, emphasises the relationships of nature’s death to human death and to the half-life of illusionistic art. An anonymous 18th-century Italian painted a pink rose nestled beside a polished skull and, in a subtitle, gave the canvas a voice of its own: “We are both unreal, I am also death.” It’s a motto that helps tease apart the bright, lively surfaces of Packer’s paintings with their undercurrents of twilight and grief.

To April 17, whitney.org