Meet the Artist – Roni Packer

Magasin III Jaffa Books series of meetings with artists will host the artist Roni Packer for the opening of her new display at the vitrine – Zero Separation.
The opening event will take place on Thursday, July 7th, at 6pm-8pm.

Roni Packer’s studio practice revolves around color and paint, and the wish to bring forward the abundance of these two on a flat surface. In Zero Separation, Packer’s installation for Magasin III Jaffa bookstore’s vitrine, she takes a step back from her color practice to reclaim the surface underneath the paint. Instead of a brush, she worked on the raw canvas with an iron, highlighting the off-white cloth, creating a double-sided canvas piece. Packer never used red in her work, but in this mini installation she is asking to proclaim Polly Apfelbaum’s red*.

She does that with one thin line at the edge of the raw canvas, a red seam which she uses to set a boundary. However, it wasn’t enough. Packer missed the paint. And so, at the foot of the canvas piece, she places a skin of paint, a surface without a surface. The perpendicular canvas and the horizontal skin of paint are two individual pieces, yet a complete separation is not an option.

On top of the red paint skin Packer sets a sculpture of a circle figure. “And, just as the outside of a Cube is a Square, so the outside of a Sphere presents the appearance of a Circle.” (Flatland, Edwin A. Abbott, p 65).

*Apfelbaum’s exhibition Red Desert, Red Mountain, Red Sea is currently exhibited at Magasin III Jaffa, across the street from the bookstore’s vitrine.