Between Flesh and Luggage: Painting Exile after Francis Bacon
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The Iranian artist Mohammed Sami creates paintings that unfold like scenes caught between departure and disaster. Roads bend into nowhere, clouds mushroom and stain the air, bodies dissolve into lines, and above all there are suitcasesstacked, buckled, collapsing, turning into thrones or burdens. His work is not content to illustrate “migration” as a simple theme; instead it stages the psychic after-image of leaving one place for another, of moving from his first home in 2003 to Sweden and then Canada, carrying histories that can’t be checked in or declared at the border, at least.
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Declaration of influence by Bacon’s shadow: the body under pressure
Francis Bacon is an important ghost in Sami’s canvases. Bacon twisted the human figure until it screamed, turning flesh into a record of invisible pressure fear, desire, guilt, history. Sami takes that language of distortion and relocates it to the geography of exile.
Like Bacon, he rarely paints stable, comfortable bodies. The figures are ghosted in white lines, reduced to skeletons or slivers of flesh, often headless or faceless. They sit or stand in shallow, stage-like spaces where perspective is skewed and the ground never feels secure. Limbs are doubled, erased or replaced by mechanical forms. The animals that appear. a horse, a bird, skulls—echo Bacon’s obsession with flesh, but here they feel less like images of the hunt and more like companions from a destroyed landscape, spectres that have followed him through airports and across continents.
What differentiates Sami’s work from Bacon’s is the world around these figures. Bacon’s rooms were hermetic cages; Sami’s spaces are open but hostile: highways fenced with barbed wire, grey skies pregnant with smoke, waiting zones where the sign “Gate Closed” becomes a verdict on an entire life. Where Bacon’s force comes from inside the flesh, Sami’s comes from borders, checkpoints and histories that press onto the body from the outside.
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Luggage as direct symbol!
In painting after painting, stacks of suitcases form a kind of second anatomy. In one work a figure is perched on a mountain of bags, like a king on a fragile throne. In another, a body is almost crushed under a sliding avalanche of hard cases. Elsewhere, a slumped figure outlined in white rests on luggage as if on a tomb, while a faint, more classical presence hovers behind like a memory that refuses to leave.
These bags are not neutral travel props. Their colours turquoise, red, army green, cheap plastic blues summon budget airlines, refugee convoys and childhood vacations all at once. They stand in for everything that is carried but cannot be spoken: documents, inherited stories, photographs left behind, languages that are slowly slipping away.
In Sami’s journey from his homeland to Sweden and then to Canada, luggage becomes a permanent condition rather than a temporary object. The paintings understand this: the bags stop being containers and instead become architecture, furniture, even prosthetic limbs. They are the material proof that migration is not a clean break but an ongoing negotiation with what he refuses to abandon.
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The violence of in-between, yet.
Several works split the canvas into zones: top and bottom, left and right, abstract and figurative. Cloudy monochrome areas smoke, dust, fog face off against flat fields of colour, as if two incompatible climates have collided. This visual fracture mirrors the experience of living between cultures and languages. Sami is never only in Sweden or only in Canada; the earlier landscape keeps erupting like the clouds of debris that bloom in the corner of a painting.
The text fragments “TO BE / NOT TO BE”, “Gate Closed”—underline this drama of in-between. Hamlet’s existential question becomes brutally literal in the context of war and migration: to be here or not be at all; to move or stay and risk disappearance. A closed gate at an airport or border is not just an inconvenience, but a reminder of all the other closures that shape contemporary displacement: closed embassies, closed minds, closed futures.
His quick, graffiti-like marks, the electric white lines that loop and knot around the figures, suggest movement that cannot settle. They trace the nervous energy of someone always ready to move again if the situation changes: a life lived with one hand on the handle of a suitcase.
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Children’s things and the afterglow of conflict
Among the suitcases, weapons and skulls, children’s objects appear with unsettling clarity—backpacks decorated with cartoon characters, bright plastics that belong to another genre of image entirely. Here Sami’s paintings speak most directly to the ethical horror of forced migration and war. The cheerful logos are not ironic decorations; they are evidence that even childhood has been packed up and carried through checkpoints.
In this way, Bacon’s psychological intensity meets a more contemporary register. Bacon painted popes and businessmen; Sami paints anonymous fighters and civilians whose lives intersect in the chaos of conflict. The skeletal figures that hold rifles or sit among clouds of smoke are not heroic or demonic; they are emptied out, as though history has scraped them clean. Their faces are missing, replaced by blocks of colour or scribbles, which forces the viewer to imagine a person rather than simply read a stereotype.
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From Iran, Sweden to Canada: new light, same shadows
Sami’s move first to Sweden and then to Canada introduces new climates into the work. The northern light seems to filter into the palette: cold blues, long grey planes, ochre skies that feel like evening stretching on forever. Yet the motifs of barbed wire, smoke and luggage persist, insisting that migration is not a story with a clean happy ending.
In the later paintings, the backgrounds open up. Large areas of flat colour or empty space surround the central figure or pile of bags. This emptiness can be read as the spaciousness of a new country wider streets, bigger houses, broader horizons but it also carries a tinge of isolation. The figure on the throne of suitcases sits in an enormous, almost indifferent space, as if the new world has room for him but not yet a place.
At the same time, there is a hint of humour and resilience. The precarious piles, the cartoon bags, the almost slapstick imbalance of some compositions suggest that survival also involves improvisation, irony, even play. Sami’s line has a looseness that refuses pure tragedy; it flirts with caricature, allowing the work to breathe.
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Painting as a portable home
Across the series, painting itself becomes a kind of luggage for Mohammed Sami: a portable structure in which memory, fear and desire can be packed, unpacked and rearranged. The canvas offers what no border does a space where contradictory times and places can coexist. Bacon famously said he wanted to “give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance”; Sami’s paintings extend that ambition into the politics of migration. They do not tell a simple narrative of victimhood or triumph. Instead they make visible the sensation of being permanently in transit, haunted by places already lost and not yet fully arrived.
In dialogue with Bacon, Sami’s work shows how the tormented body of post-war European painting can be reimagined through the lens of contemporary displacement. The flesh in his paintings is not only screaming; it is packing, waiting, remembering, carrying. The suitcases may never be fully unpacked, but in his hands they become something more than weight. They are, paradoxically, the building blocks of a new visual language—one that belongs to the specific route he has taken: from Iran, through Sweden’s winters, into Canada’s wide and complicated light.
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Mansoureh Maadi/ Sweden 2013
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​The Earlier Works of the Iranian Born Mohammed Sami
Smoke, curves, and lines
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If the defining concern of the Renaissance was how we see and represent the world, our own age is preoccupied with how we interpret it – with meaning, implication, and signification. Seen from this angle, contemporary art appears as a dense “text” that must be excavated: its forms and shifting meanings resist capture, entangled as they are with the artist’s private self and with multiple zones of expression, both exposed and concealed.
Faced with such work, the viewer has little choice but to rely on tools of cognitive and aesthetic excavation, as well as on a personal sensibility shaped within a broader cultural environment. In what follows, I will attempt to enter the world of the paintings of the young Iranian-born, Swedish-based artist Mohammed Sami (b. 1984) from their hidden side first, before turning to the qualities of their visible, pictorial presence.
We encounter first a surface or rather, unstable surfaces charged with the emotions of the creatures that inhabit his world. These forms do not hide the sources of their alarmed responses to existence. In his drawings, whether early or recent, a sharp, cutting register persists. Even when he tries to temper it with new technical devices, it never fully submits to his wish to contain it.
Because this expressive force – at once longstanding and renewed – cannot be addressed by simple questioning, we are driven to probe deeply into the artist’s inner life. Only then might we locate the source of the intense emotional current that runs through his work.
Sami lived through the terror of recent Iranian history when he was young, particularly its most acute phase between 1985 and 2005, during and in the long aftermath of the Iran–Iraq war. These years culminated in a near-fatal medical crisis for him. The damage was limited to the ninth cranial nerve in the neck, which controls one side of the body, and did not reach the brain directly a narrow margin by which he escaped probable death.
Yet every bodily injury has consequences, whether lasting or temporary, visible or invisible. Wounds of this kind – his own and those of others have become grimly familiar to individuals in Iran during this catastrophic period. The constant nervous tension, the omnipresent fear in an atmosphere of explosions and assassinations in those years and earlier, left deep marks on Sami.
Birds and animals especially horses – remain closely bound to nature, their “umbilical cord” still attached to the environment. When nature is struck by catastrophe, they fracture quickly. Their senses anticipate danger before ours do; they once served as early warning systems for early humans, signalling the arrival or approach of threats. They possess only wings or legs as means of escape.
These are the very creatures that recur in Sami’s work beings he chose, or that chose him functioning as prophetic sensors scattered across many of his painted fields. His horses tell us as much: they are always fleeing or spinning within a dark, opaque space stripped of orientation. At times they circle their fate; at others they try to outrun it. Sometimes they cross the canvas into the unknown, or climb to heights from which descent seems impossible.
Even when his horses draw on the suppleness of their bodies, his birds more fragile still – appear crushed, convulsed, their wings broken. Even in their upward flight they become metaphors for our souls, shattered by the shrapnel of absurd wars. They are like a nerve torn from its root. They are also the nerve of Mohammed Sami himself, patched together in time yet bearing the visible scars of its damaged eras.
The human brain is composed of roughly one hundred billion neurons, linked into networks that enable us to perceive the external world, focus attention, and guide our actions. Has the artwork – even if only as a set of signals and performative pathways become entangled with this neural web, particularly in expressive art?
Perhaps. In any case, such a connection is palpable in Sami’s practice, as in the work of many artists whose lives have been penetrated by times of catastrophe and war. Between the recording of immediate reaction and its subsequent concealment, expressive performance comes to recognise its own intentions. It is only natural that the artist’s nervous system – still sharply reactive, never fully calmed – should govern part of this process. I am inclined to believe that the lesion remains active within him.
At times we must call on science to better grasp our relationship with the natural world, in both its visible and microscopic dimensions. Some artists have explicitly drawn on microscopic cellular structures in their work – the abstract artist Wells, for example.
Sami’s drawings are dominated by a linear, nervous network whose motion and flashes of light recall the very morphology of neurons: branching lines, filament-like threads, and their convoluted paths. Whether the artist is fully conscious of these visual sources or not, there is clearly a driving impulse at work. In his case, it appears to be an inner impulse that has taken hold of his expressive, almost mechanical performance, generating effects that overwhelm the scenography of his images.
Because the later chapters of his life have been tied with neurological damage, that trace – here a trace analogous to the neural network is far from exhausted. I suspect that his nervous system, especially the nerves of the arm (the ulnar and median), still carries the imprint of strain, even if its ferocity has abated somewhat in his more recent works. Perhaps some of the stored charge has been released; this is suggested by the way he now “plays” within the field of his performance, technically rather than purely spontaneously, experimenting with new formal vocabularies.
Such artistic play requires sustained looking and a degree of relaxation, and this seems to characterise his newer technical experiments. These stand in productive tension with the spontaneity and unity of the impulsive, expressive act that dominated much of his earlier production.
Sami tends to structure his drawings on three operative levels that are often distinct yet remain unified in subject and scene.
First, he builds the composition on backgrounds that are usually dark. Black appears as his talisman – a primordial chaos from which his forms emerge, stumbling amid sudden bursts of light. Sometimes the black alone suffices; at other times he splits it with the colour of sky or with other hues whose brilliance has been subdued.
The second level is the coloured, figurative stratum: forms of his preferred creatures, shaped according to the rhythm of their intended motions, often with outer contours incised as if by graphic techniques. Shards of the dark ground may pierce these forms, fragmenting and scattering them, erasing parts of their identity.
The third level is the “neural” flash and its extensions – or rather, the traces of these flashes across part or all of the surface. Yet he has not contented himself with this level, which could function autonomously as pure abstraction. In more recent drawings he tries to weave his creatures into this network of radiations, and at other times to conjure the creatures themselves, almost as if excavated from the light flashes and their emanations. He has, I believe, succeeded in creating a new performative element that fuses drawing with linear engraving and even with design.
These technical developments and the paintings discussed here are part of this experimentation align with his craftsmanlike, design-oriented temperament: a passion for mechanical procedures and for graphic design, which he practised in Iran alongside his more spontaneous artistic work. This passion began to bear visible fruit around 2010, particularly in a piece I saw in the Association of Foreign Artists’ exhibition at Kate Road Gallery in Canada.
There he had begun to draw or incise geometric lines and bands that cut through or even constitute parts of his creatures’ bodies. It seems that Sami, fearing that his subject matter or its emotional intensity might be exhausted, has started to “rationalise” his artistic tools. His parallel lines, whether straight or curved, belong to a consciously designed, ordered world, even when they collide with his spontaneous realm. They have nonetheless opened a new scenographic field, especially in his large-scale drawings, which he has recently favoured for their capacity to dominate exhibition space.
Is Mohammed, through this linear procedure, seeking to curb the sway of his emotions, or merely to disperse them across these expanded surfaces? I suspect both possibilities are at play, so long as his art continues to follow its creative impulse toward horizons whose trajectories he himself traces.
What truly compelled me to write – and to insist on this introduction about psychological shock in relation to his work – was witnessing his attempt to make object-based pieces: sculptural works composed of one or several volumes enclosed within a light box whose form closely echoes a neuron with its branching filaments.
If some of these forms are visibly pierced by shrapnel, other pieces of shrapnel seem intent on leaving no clear trace. Their presence is limited to a kind of game of concealment within the haze and vortex of lines, shapes, and the interplay of the three levels. When the human figure is not completely shattered, this is, I think, in order not to efface the shadow of its feminine features, which push forward from the remnants of bodies like air that vanishes the moment it touches the faces he prefers to paint.
Sami’s drawings suggest that everything remains transient until we have reconciled with our surroundings and with ourselves – and that woman, bird, and animal remain our furthest yet most intimate refuge, the warm corner we must preserve like a womb untainted by the filth of our contemporary world, with its violations of human dignity and its poisoning of the open sky.
On a practical level, Mohammed Sami established a striking presence after immigrating to the Swedish city of Norrköping, where he lived before moving to Toronto, Canada. It is not easy for an artist who is still a refugee and at the beginning of his career to secure such opportunities in a country like Sweden. I believe that the specific qualities of Sami’s drawings rooted in the wider field of young contemporary art, blending elements of pop and graffiti, lightness of subject and execution, expansive scenes, and, more recently, an experimental design obsession – are precisely what keep his work in view and win him exhibition opportunities that remain inaccessible to many other young migrant artists in a society that closely examines the behaviour and performance of the “foreign” or “outsider” figure.
​Farouk Saleem/ Toronto
Translated by Fatima M. Giani
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