"Salman Toor: Wish Maker" by Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen

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? 

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