Mohammed Sami, The Point 0

Camden Art Centre, 27 January - 28 May 2023

Harsh themes call for harsh pictures, contends Mohammed Sami’s solo show at Camden Art Centre. The paintings in The Point 0 have in common muted palettes and dry, unlovely surfaces. This is logical enough for a body of work concerned with the artist’s experiences in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and later as a refugee, but it is also an excessively literal approach to painting that allows for few moments of revelation.

For example, the huge painting Refugee Camp is dominated by a cliff face, a heavy passage of cool earth tones that literally soars above our heads, tough and unforgiving. At the top, the light of day breaks over a building and plays warmly amongst the trees. The seemingly insurmountable obstacles in our way, the hopeful light that shines on the survivors – it’s not exactly a new dawn for visual metaphor, is it?

Refugee Camp

Similarly, in The Praying Room, light and shade play conventional roles. The shadow of the open door throws the face of a cleric, whose picture is on the wall, into darkness, casting literal doubt over his features and metaphorical doubt over his character. An otherwise innocuous houseplant causes an ominous shadow to appear on the wall, as if to say that all is not well. There is no doubt about Sami’s technical mastery of light and shade, but too often his use of it lapses into cliché.

The Praying Room

More allusive is the light that drifts softly through a crack in the door of Meditation Room, forming a yellow haze in the gloomy interior. Then, at the right, it smacks against the wall as a hard yellow stripe, renouncing its ethereal qualities to assert its substantiality. Here, the representation of light is nuanced, creating space for a wider and more exciting play of metaphor to attach itself to it. Unfortunately, pleasures of this kind are few and far between in the show. 

Meditation Room

There is a noticeable absence of human figures in Sami’s work. They occur only indirectly in posters within the scenes, or implicitly through clothing. In Every Day is Ashura II, the personalities of the owners of a row of uniform black garments are vivified by the colourful disarray of the hangers. In The Weeping Lines, the translucency of the clothes hanging out to dry produces a ghostly effect, imputing a sense of tragedy to the absence of people with flair. Absence comes to the fore as a productive quality of the work.

Every Day is Ashura II

These devices are effective but cry out to be pushed further. Throughout the show, each painting seems to be limited to one idea, two at the most, with little interaction between them within any single canvas. This might seem like judicious restraint on the artist’s part, but I can’t help thinking that a combination of several of these techniques might detach them from the realm of convention and break them into fresher terrain.