Mohammed Sami

Mohammed Sami’s paintings have solemn wall power. Each piece holds its space in the gallery, an assured stand-alone presence, but also puts up a wall of its own, giving little away. Several of the eight paintings presented in his exhibition “To Whom It May Concern” seemed designed to shut us out. Despite its title, the nearly ten-foot-tall Law Books, 2023, resembles a towering brick barrier that appears to be crumbling or not yet complete. It represents a hard, flat dead end, even if modulations in the pale-orange to clay-red palette soften and nuance the matter-of-fact tessellations, like rays of evening sun striking a backyard wall. Sami’s subject is nonetheless another type of bulwark: His bricks are tightly packed legal tomes, volume upon volume of principles and procedures, regulations and rights. The law is envisioned, for good or bad, as a boundary, a solid defense, or a formidable impediment. Which side of the divide we’re on seems immaterial, but in painting these books, this wall, Sami emphasizes obscurity and obstruction, a barrier to seeing or understanding.

This focus on concealment was recurrent in the show. (Even the formal salutation of the title signals a presumed lack of revelation, an appeal to anonymous officialdom, with little expectation of reply.) Sami’s background may inform the work’s guarded outlook. As a promising young artist in Baghdad in the 1990s, he was recruited by Ba’ath Party propagandists to paint public portraits of Saddam Hussein, developing his talent while compelled to serve the Iraqi despot’s demand for cultural omnipresence. Sami left the country in the convulsive aftermath of the US-led intervention in 2003. No wonder, then, that during his subsequent artistic training—in Belfast and London—resistance to didactic messaging emerged as an implicit code. Memories of life in Iraq remain foundational to Sami’s art. But with each measured allusion to Saddam-era tyranny or regime-change turmoil, we detect an anxious impulse to withhold, mask, or deflect. 

Some of the paintings dwell on imagery indicative of arrested communication. Aborted Calls, 2024—about half the size of Law Books—spotlights a disorderly bundle of small, slim, bloodred rectangles in the foreground of a gloomy shuttered room: a mysterious stockpile of cell phones, discarded, seized, or otherwise out of commission. In the smaller acrylic Royal Mail, 2024—closely color-matched to the stark black-red, night-vision tones of Aborted Calls—a sleek letter opener rests on an unopened envelope. The painting is an austere still life, but, as with Chekhov’s proverbial gun, the desktop blade appears charged with dramatic consequence or violent potential. Here, of course, the scene stays in permanent suspension: the knife unused, the content of the letter undisclosed. (Notably, for the Douglas Hyde’s touchstone program in which its featured artists are also invited to present a work by someone else, Sami chose Bas Jan Ader’s I’m Too Sad to Tell You, 1971, a filmed self-portrait showing an unexplained moment of tearful sorrow.)

One effect of this concentration on inaccessible information is heightened attention to surface. Conscious that these taciturn compositions keep much of the artist’s remembered world suppressed, we seek clues to history or autobiography in the spare, enigmatic content. But we also look for clues in the variegated facture of each canvas, attributing semantic significance to understated variations in texture and technique. The apparently abstract expanse of Permanent Night, 2023, shows, in fact, a chipboard-covered window, with Sami’s painstaking brushwork intricately mimicking the crisscrossed substance of the protective panel. Softer passages of glimpsed yellow and adjacent bronze, faintly inscribed with fragments of Sumerian script, glow between blunt, defensive, brown-black planes, hinting, perhaps, at hidden light betokening human presence behind the barricading facade. Even so, Sami remains disinclined to show and tell—committed to a painting style that is technically adept but temperamentally indrawn, forever held at the impassable border between his world and ours.