Hugely pleasurable – a vision of summer: Jennifer Packer at the Serpentine Gallery reviewed

We need to talk about Eric. In Jennifer Packer’s portrait of her friend and fellow artist, Eric N. Mack sits on a yellow chair that might have been borrowed from Van Gogh’s bedroom. He’s wearing excellent odd socks, one pink to rhyme with his shoes, the other yellow matching his trousers and chair.

But it’s Eric’s face that’s most compelling. Like the ‘Mona Lisa’, Eric’s expression is inscrutable. He might be thinking about what’s for tea, the crisis in pictorial representation or, quite likely, nodding off. This enigmatic quality is intentional. ‘When I painted Eric, I wanted accuracy, but I also wanted to privilege his subjectivity and privacy,’ says Packer.

But doing that is a tricky thing for a painter to attempt. 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. Art is part of this rapacious age, turning subjects into a mere feast for the eyes. Packer doesn’t roll that way: she gives her subjects the dignity of privacy. They refuse the all-consuming gaze. 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.

That said, this show is the most pleasurable painting exhibition I’ve seen in ages. Thank you, Jennifer Packer, for bringing to a rain-lashed London July a 3 x 4.38m vision of proper summer. On a vast, lemon-sunny canvas, a man lies stupefied on a couch in an apartment. It’s too damned hot. He has a towel across his otherwise bare body and the fan is working overtime.