"Salman Toor's Night Vision" by Jenny Wu

The artist depicts queer men of colour in genre scenes that are at once nostalgic and speculative

Painting in a style that falls between illustration and academicism, Salman Toor depicts queer men of colour in genre scenes that are at once nostalgic and speculative. The long-limbed and paunchy characters in Toor’s world are seen gathered at parties, picnics and parades thick with bodies and sketches of bodies, enacting bygone or imagined encounters with friends and lovers. Wish Maker, Toor’s first major New York exhibition since his institutional debut at the Whitney in 2020, weighs 19 of his paintings at Luhring Augustine’s Chelsea location against 44 of his works on paper in the gallery’s Tribeca space. Here, Toor not only portrays viable alternatives to a heteronormative world, in the form of queer spaces and sociality, but also accentuates his draughtsmanlike pentimenti to represent, within his own fabulations, other images that might have surfaced – and to which it seems he could still return.

Wish Maker speaks to itself across the borough and across mediums. Some pieces in Tribeca, like the charcoal, ink and gouache image Three Kissers (2024), correspond to works in Chelsea – in this case, a slightly larger oil painting with the same name. In both, two men lean expectantly towards a third, their hands busily caressing his face and back. Oh Father (2024) is another image that recurs: a composition reminiscent of Baroque painter Juan Rodríguez Juárez’s Spaniard and Indian Produce a Mestizo (c. 1715), Oh Father depicts a gay couple with a baby confronting an older man who has his hand on the head of a subdued woman. Despite the rift between the groups, the couple stands embracing one another and their child.

Read full article at artreview.com