Salman Toor
Salman Toor, Museum Boys, 2021, oil on panel, 76 × 102 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Luhring Augustine, New York; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London & Naples
The artist’s paintings test and probe the thresholds (real and imagined) that shape the queer and migrant experience, holding and proposing unruly ideas
‘The border is the locus of resistance, of rupture, of implosion and explosion, and of putting together the fragments and creating new assemblages,’ writes Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa in the posthumously published treatise Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro (2015). The border, or threshold in his own words, is a conceptual keystone across the narrative painting practice of Pakistani-American artist Salman Toor. It appears in one painting as the beguiling gaze of an androgynous bartender over a countertop; in another as the screen that shines blue light upon the reclining naked body of a young brown man. The most frontal and, one might say, most critical translation of the threshold appears in a sensitive body of works that foreground the bodies of immigrants at airport checkpoints. Having moved to the US from Lahore in 2002, Toor draws from personal as well as communal experiences of harsh, often dehumanising border controls and racial profiling in the wake of 9/11. Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug (2019) shows a brown-skinned man with downcast eyes, doggedly looking at his belongings scattered across the counter before him, as if willing back together the pieces of his shattered dignity. The painting implicates us across its threshold, created ‘from the perspective of the immigration officer so that the viewer’s gaze fuses with theirs’, writes Ambika Trasi in her essay for Toor’s 2020 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, New York. Man with Face Creams… is one among almost 40 paintings and drawings, spanning from 2019 to the present, on show as part of Toor’s first institutional show in Europe, at London’s Courtauld Gallery. The show’s curator, Elena Crippa, points to the timely emotive duality that the work contends with: ‘our pressing need to belong as much as experiences of exclusion’.
Read full article at artreview.com.