The Brooklyn Rail

Salman Toor’s sprawling new show at Luhring Augustine is heartbreaking. Two venues—the Chelsea location devoted to paintings and Tribeca to prints and works in charcoal, ink, and gouache on paper—span the artist’s new interest in breaking and loosening his art. Animating the archetypes of immigrant, foreigner, lover, masturbator, friend—the self and others as so many parts and all these dream people as aspects of an unavailable interior—the slippery works demonstrate the precarity of social, of political, life. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and trained in Ohio and later New York, Toor’s works are marked—as noted by his retrospectives at the Whitney (How Will I Know [2021]), the Baltimore Museum of Art (No Ordinary Love [2022]), and his presentations at the Frick (2021–22) and the Venice Biennale (Foreigners Everywhere [2024]), as well as by Toor himself—by the otherness of transposition, as the psychic separations that mark anyone bridging two worlds in the breach, slipping hot from one to the other. All of oneself and nothing. Heartbreaking.

I want to ask here why and how this otherness is sublimated in Toor’s work to the format of a museum picture. What we are to make, that is, of the artist’s persistently art historical devices—the translation of composition, pose, gesture, mood, and mark—drawn from major museum precedents to the quiet and intimate scale and palette of a private world? Why do Édouard Manet, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Antoine Watteau, Jacques-Louis David, Amrita Sher-Gil, Gustave Courbet, and Caravaggio—their characters, material investigations, and spanning centuries—come to narrate Toor’s attentiveness to queer immigrant life, his bringing into viscous luminosity a community of painted subjects in New York in the 2020s? To their dances and drinks and kisses and touches and phones and desires? 

Let’s take The Islanders (2025), a painting that recalls, in its poking of the flesh, the physical verifications of Caravaggio’s Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601–02). The central figure, in beanie, sneaker, and melting socks, is poked and prodded by two other figures in a state of undress. Their rendering as brown or white is equally a play with pictorial value, light and shadow, and they hold in their hands lumps of brown dripping paint: hot shit, dried blood, brown pigment. Extractions replace the central figure’s stigmata; the figures show their hairy backs to us. The brown figure on the left wears a wig and a ribbon, a coat and ruffles, the blonde spill of a yolky wig; the white figure on the right does the poking, one foot on a pedestal, wearing a T-shirt, hat, and string shawls. The two are ribald Toor archetypes, but the central figure is strangely noble, suddenly a martyr. The companion etching in Tribeca, The Barter (2025), extends this reading. The central figure looks sacrificed, like Manet’s dead Christ (with Angels [1864]), as his hands cup a leafed fruit. The positions of the figures on either side have shifted slightly, their teeth are grinning, more ominous, their shoes mismatched, though clearer. Suddenly without color, the figural qualities, ceded in the paintings to dabs and commas, briefly become more narrative, animate, characterful. But even Toor’s new palette—brown, sky blue, milky white, charcoal, mustard, and coral—with his greens, and his new materials—charcoal, ink, and gouache—with his oils, retain still his vocabulary of marks and scratches and pats, transactional in their state as nakedness and undress, as if the figure is becoming firmer so that it may loosen and break and come undone more fully. 

Toor does not do this to relinquish his art historical ambition, but to overcome that ambition’s earlier emphasis on composition, pose, expression, and grammar as vehicles for contemporary life and, conversely, the surfacing of these historical paintings in present costume. His art now melts and puddles and gropes towards something else: a vulnerable, honest desire to be seen. Finding, for years, art history “everywhere,” Toor knows he is “part of that story now.”¹ Which is to say that the recovery of contemporary life with physically foreign, historical sources is unlearning itself, finding simplicity within its own interrogation: now, the melting pictorial units; there, the simplicity of a loving face; full lips; steaming lumps of extracted paint. The Scroller (2024) masturbates accompanied by the outline of extra hands and feet; Three Kissers (2024) press into one another, their tender faces juicing towards something like life. Beach (2023) and Daddy (2024) put clothes on, no mask, no clown nose. They overcome the heaps of “Raphael hands, Anthony van Dyck noses, Philip Guston legs (and lightbulbs), and Amrita Sher-Gil expressions,”² and they become more fully Toor’s people, with a tenderness that keeps hearts beating in the hands and eyes of another. 

So. The scale is modest, the sources are integrated, the mood is tender, the heart is broken. But it is not over. Toor’s world remains irreverent and distracted, lit externally by lamps, white paint, and screens. Everyone is in danger of violation. The figures melt easily into their dream states with their blonde wigs, their scrota, their hairs, as they evacuate their own claims and open out in embrace. New, large landscapes and architectures, several from a memory of South Asia, emerge. His mother’s bedroom returns in Mommy’s Room (2024); an archetypal father enters in Oh Father (2025). Dreamy Boy (2024) and The Scholar (2024) wash up emerald. The terrain of the dream, the nightmare, the wish is expanded. Art’s history is a wish fulfilled. Its fulfillment is insufficient. We are at an opening.