"Mohammed Sami: The Point 0" by Laura Cumming

A door stands slightly ajar. Through it a pencil of light steals across an abruptly rucked carpet – as if someone had just tried to force their way in or out – and up the wall of a darkened room. The glow has a sinister crackle, just bright enough to illuminate the bottom of a large photograph of a military figure. His head is lost in the shadows.

Yet even in this loose painterly transcription of a photo, the stance, bulk and uniform immediately conjure Saddam Hussein. The carpet too, a nearly abstract array of marks, is apparently Arabic. What is happening on the other side of that door, however, might be going on anywhere in the world right now. Or so the picture implies, with its lingering ambiguities of time, place and light. Its title is Meditation Room.

Mohammed Sami was born in Baghdad in 1984, and was co-opted by the Ba’ath party to produce murals until he managed to escape, first to Sweden and eventually Britain. He is an outstanding painter, as strange as he is gifted. His scenes are set in a no man’s land somewhere between memory and dream. They partake of reality while inventing their own visual world.

A heap of mattresses – beautifully painted in all their minute differences of colour and design, as if to illustrate the Princess and the Pea – implies the bodies who once lay upon them. Ten Siblings is the melancholy title. A rack of black gowns, on hangers, so that the hooks stand in for heads, looks like a procession of deadly judges.

The Parliament Room is a brilliant conceit: the backs of empty chairs stretching into the distance like a cemetery of headstones. But more than that, it is a fascinating work of art, each shape painted with translucent delicacy as it disappears into a blood-red darkness; some still glimmer in the gloom, as if there were half-dead ghosts up ahead.

Read full article at theguardian.com