Source: GQIndia

© "The Green Room", (2019); courtesy of Salman Toor

Pakistani-origin, New York-based artist Salman Toor wants to paint a world where the East and West harmonise 

By Nidhi Gupta12 March 2020

 Brooklyn, for Salman Toor, “is a community of conscientious small businesses, flourishing among graffitied industrial spaces, where people dress eccentrically and growing up is optional.” The NYC borough is also home to Toor’s studio: A cramped loft where a wall is studded with his paintings, both finished and in progress; and a makeshift shelf in a corner is piled high with paints and brushes, books and trophies, an opened bottle of champagne and paper. 

This is where Toor, a 30-something, Lahore-born artist who resides in the East Village, spends most of his day working alone – “until I miss my friends. Then I hang out at local dive bars with them, babbling away over drinks about our weekend woes, despairing over Trump’s latest tweet and the effect of living between cultures on our weirdly jeopardised and liberated inner selves.” 

That in-betweener aura bleeds through Toor’s figurative paintings too. From a distance, his paintings – small scale and mostly done in oil on canvas – look like they belong to a long gone era, evoking the air-brushed detailing of Rubens or Vermeer. Look closer and you see his preoccupations are very much of our zeitgeist. 

“In the past, my paintings were more about life in South Asia, the anxiety around class and caste,” says the Pratt Institute alumnus, who left Pakistan in the early 2000s to study art at Ohio Wesleyan. Now, he seeks to offer an intimate view into the lives of queer, brown men living in the US and South Asia.

Lunch, Salman Toor

This painting above, for instance, is called Lunch: A tondo panel featuring three friends, their skin and hair colour as individual as their fashion choices, draped in long snaky limbs and clergyman’s hats, feasting on coffee and pasta, and peering into a smartphone. When Toor put it up on his Instagram, he added hashtags like #feather, #queer and #reverie.

Another painting, called Mehfil/Party depicts a house party that could be a scene out of a Sofar Sounds concert. Young men play the harmonium and sitar in a corner, another in a rapper’s hat appears to be singing a ghazal. Their audience sit, stand, lie scattered all over the room, in twos and threes. It went up on Instagram filed under #safespace, #matinee and #culturevulture. 

In these rooms, bars and streets, against broad brushed-backgrounds, straggly men dance, lounge, kiss, laugh, talk, dress up, eat, stream and exist at peace in their environments. For the most part, there are no victims here. Nor are these tableaux of a gentle urban life staged or modelled for: Toor says he paints from memory and imagination. 

In all of the artist’s work, currency and nostalgia, belonging and alienation coexist: And it’s perhaps that paradoxical quality that’s earned him a growing base of followers everywhere, from NYC to Lahore to Delhi. Toor remembers receiving a “ton of love” for his show at Nature Morte in Delhi, in January, titled I Know A Place. From Instagram stories, he gleaned that “a lot of people who went to see it were going straight from the protests” and found that heartening. This month, as he gets set for his first solo museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, he talks to GQ about his extraordinary life and where he’s finding inspiration these days. 

The artist at his studio in Brooklyn

What draws you to painting at a time when mixed media is all over the place?

I am lucky to be painting at a time when figurative painting has taken on new cultural value when associated with women and people of colour. There seems to be a collective attempt to revise and revitalise the history of figurative painting and sculpture in the West. 

 Your show at Whitney is called How Will I Know – what’s the story behind the title?

“How Will I Know” is a Whitney Houston song title from her 1985 eponymous album. In a few of my paintings I had envisioned people dancing to something like a 1980s Whitney song. One of the paintings is also titled Dancing to Whitney. So when Ambika Trasi and Christopher Lew, both curators from the Whitney, decided to give me a show, we thought the title should be a Whitney Houston song. 

Do you remember your first drawing? 

Not the very first, but some of my earliest drawings were of beautiful women. With arched eyebrows and very long hair, flying in the wind. I also liked to draw high heels.

How were you drawn to art? 

I was always making images from a young age. At school, other boys laughed at me for drawing “foxy ladies” all the time instead of playing cricket. My family home was always full of my drawings. By the time I was graduating from Ohio Wesleyan in 2006, my family had let me totally follow my calling. 

You also lived in a hippie commune during this time? 

Yes, my favourite memory is dancing with tambourines and incense to a mad beating of drums around a fire. Living in the commune was a good way for me to enter American culture. The aesthetic was a marriage between the pastoral ideals in the paintings I was learning about and American trucker music. The Grateful Dead were played a lot.

Is music an important part of your creative process?

I listen to movie soundtracks a lot while working. My latest favourite is the theme music from The Shining. It’s creepy and sounds like a Bach organ symphony. Other favourites have been old Farida Khanum ghazals and the Sense And Sensibility OST. Cheesy, cosy, classical homemaking music is fun during work. 

What were your early influences and how did this change while at art school?

In high school [while in Pakistan], I looked at local painters like Sadequain and Allah Bux. I related to figures and paintings from Amrita Sher-Gil the most. Her emancipated sense of self, glamour and power was fascinating for me. 

At college, I haunted museums and tried to paint like the European Old Masters, particularly from the Baroque and Rococo movements. These lessons paid off when I decided to leave behind the academic practice and go for quick, imaginary paintings of things that were closer to my actual day-to-day concerns and amusements. I’d say my style has evolved from the language of academic realism into the language of subjectivity. 

What, if any, alternate notion of masculinity do you offer in your work? 

I actually think of my work as feminine. I like frills and prettiness, but I’m also interested in brown bodies, their place in the history of European painting, their encounters with the Western imagination. I’m interested in showing brown bodies in settings they are not traditionally shown in, bourgeois and bohemian settings, comfortable and secure.

There’s a certain vulnerability about these characters, especially in paintings like Man with Tote Bag and Laptop, or Immigration Men, or indeed the nudes like Lavender Boy. Is this deliberate?

I like for the characters in my painting to move between vulnerability and empowerment. I like foolish, marionette-like figures that evoke empathy as immigrants crossing borders, but they also have agency and dignity: things that have not been traditionally associated with our faces and bodies in painting.  

How Will I Know is at the Whitney Museum of American Art from March 20 to July 5