Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it is time to talk about Salman Toor, this artist who has the audacity to reinvent contemporary figurative painting without apologizing for being who he is. Originally from Pakistan and now operating in New York, Toor offers us a singular vision of the queer existence of South Asian men in a post-9/11 America, an America that watches, controls, and questions brown bodies with institutionalized mistrust.
In his work, the characteristic verdant luminosity, this emerald tint that bathes his nocturnal scenes, is not just a simple aesthetic signature, but a brilliant narrative device that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. This color, both “glamorous”, “toxic” and “nocturnal” according to the artist’s own words, creates a filter through which we observe these moments of male intimacy, as if we were looking through an opaque glass that lets us glimpse what is usually not visible.
This controlled transparency eerily reminds me of Guy Debord’s theories on the society of the spectacle, where every social interaction is mediated by images. In “The Society of the Spectacle” (1967), Debord asserts that “All of life in societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” [1]. Isn’t this exactly what Toor does? He transforms the direct experience of these men into representations, but with a subtle twist, he returns their agency (this capacity of an individual to act autonomously), their power to scenarize their own spectacle.
Take “The Bar on East 13th Street” (2019), an obvious nod to Manet’s “Bar aux Folies-Bergère”. Toor masterfully subverts the traditional gaze by replacing the white waitress with a brown young man. This is where Toor’s work becomes truly revolutionary, he not only appropriates the techniques and compositions of European masters but diverts them to tell radically different stories.
The melancholy that permeates Toor’s works is not without recalling Edward Said’s concept of interior exile in his writings on displacement and otherness. In “Reflections on Exile” (2000), Said writes that “exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home” [2]. This identity fracture is palpable in works like “Tea” (2020), where a young man stands, uncomfortable, before his family, their gazes charged with unspoken tensions.
Toor’s genius lies in his ability to paint spaces of provisional freedom within this condition of exile. In “Four Friends” (2019), young men dance in a cramped New York apartment, creating a temporary zone of autonomy, an ephemeral paradise where they can be fully themselves. These moments of collective joy serve as a counterpoint to the alienation that characterizes other works like “Bar Boy” (2019), where the protagonist remains alone despite the crowd, hypnotized by the glow of his phone.
Toor masters the art of painting what Said calls the “cognitive dissonance” of the immigrant, this ability to see simultaneously through several cultural perspectives. This multiple vision allows the artist to create paintings that function as layered cultural testimonies, where references to Western art history overlap with the contemporary experiences of sexual and racial minorities.
The intimacy that Toor captures in his bedroom scenes is particularly interesting. In “Bedroom Boy” (2019), a naked man takes a selfie on a pristine white bed, reinventing the classic odalisque in the era of dating apps. It is no longer the male painter’s gaze on a passive female body, but the active self-representation of a brown male body that controls its own image. Debord would have appreciated this inversion of the spectacle, where the traditionally objectified subject becomes the producer of their own representation.
Toor’s painting technique is as remarkable as his themes. His quick yet precise brushstrokes create a tension between the immediate and the eternal. As Said writes, “exiles know that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional” [2]. This ephemerality is inscribed in the very materiality of Toor’s painting, his figures seem both solidly present and on the verge of dissolving.
Toor’s work is in constant dialogue with art history, but never in a servile manner. He appropriates the gestures, compositions, and techniques of European masters to create a visual vocabulary that speaks of radically different experiences. His references range from Caravaggio to Watteau, via Manet and Van Dyck, but they are always transformed, reinvented in the service of a contemporary and personal vision.
Debord’s society of the spectacle finds a particular resonance in the omnipresence of screens in Toor’s paintings. Smartphones and laptops appear as portals to other realities, other possibilities of existence. In “Sleeping Boy” (2019), the bluish glow of a laptop illuminates the sleeping protagonist’s face, suggesting that even in sleep, these young men remain connected to virtual networks that transcend geographical borders.
This technological mediation of experience recalls Debord’s observation that “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation between people, mediated by images” [1]. Toor’s characters constantly negotiate their relationship to the world and to others through these technological interfaces, adding an additional layer of complexity to their cultural exile.
The paintings that depict border controls or searches by law enforcement (“Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug”, 2019) testify to the systemic violence targeting racialized bodies. Here, Said helps us understand how identity is constructed not only by self-definition but also by external labeling. The exile is constantly referred back to his otherness by the dominant gaze, a phenomenon that Toor captures with painful acuity.
Yet, despite the melancholy that pervades his work, Toor never succumbs to despair. There is a joyful resilience in his characters, a determination to create spaces of authenticity in a hostile world. As Said writes, “exile can produce rancors and regrets, but also a more incisive vision” [2]. This sharpened vision is precisely what Toor offers us, a gaze that is both critical and empathetic of the complexities of contemporary identity.
The work “Parts and Things” (2019) perfectly illustrates this exploration of fragmented identity. In this surrealist painting, disarticulated body parts escape from a closet, an obvious metaphor for coming out but also a visual illustration of what Said calls the “plurality of vision” of the exile. The scattered pieces, heads, torsos, limbs, evoke the multiple identity facets that diasporic subjects must constantly negotiate.
If Debord warns us against the passivity induced by the spectacle, Toor shows us how marginalized communities can reappropriate the tools of the spectacle to assert their existence. His characters are not mere passive consumers of images, but active agents who create their own visual counter-narratives.
Toor’s technical virtuosity is particularly evident in his use of light. Whether it’s the verdant glow of bars and parties or the almost divine halos that surround some of his characters, Toor uses light as a powerful narrative tool. This mastery is reminiscent of Caravaggio, but in the service of a radically contemporary vision.
In “The Star” (2019), a young man prepares in front of a mirror, assisted by friends who arrange his hair and makeup. This painting perfectly captures the ambivalence of visibility for minorities, being seen can be both a joyful affirmation and a dangerous exposure. As Debord observes, “what appears is good, what is good appears” [1], Toor complicates this equation by showing how appearance is always negotiated through power relations.
Toor’s work ultimately constitutes a subtle but incisive critique of what Said calls “orientalism”, this Western tendency to exoticize and homogenize non-Western cultures. By painting South Asian men in all their individual complexity, Toor thwarts orientalist expectations and refuses to deliver the exotic representations that the Western art market might expect from a Pakistani artist.
Toor’s strength lies in his ability to create works that function simultaneously on several levels, aesthetic, political, personal. His paintings are beautiful to look at, with their vibrant colors and carefully orchestrated compositions, but they are also deeply political in their insistence on representing lives often made invisible.
Salman Toor’s work reminds us that the most powerful art often emerges from the margins, the interstices between cultures, genders, identities. It is precisely this in-between position, this productive exile that Said speaks of, which allows Toor to bring a unique perspective to our contemporary world.
In an era where the media spectacle tends to flatten human complexity, Toor offers us images that resist simplification, that insist on the depth and ambiguity of lived experience. His paintings are invitations to look differently, to see beyond dominant representations to discover those moments of intimacy, vulnerability, and joy that make up the fabric of all human life, regardless of cultural or sexual borders.
Toor paints interior spaces, apartments, bars, bedrooms, but they are also mental spaces, emotional cartographies of the queer diasporic experience. And that is perhaps his greatest achievement: making us enter these interior spaces, inviting us to see the world through other eyes, to feel other ways of being. In an increasingly divided world, this is an act that is both aesthetic and political.
- Debord, Guy. “The Society of the Spectacle”, Éditions Buchet-Chastel, Paris, 1967.
- Said, Edward W. “Reflections on Exile and Other Essays”, Actes Sud, Arles, 2008. (Translation of “Reflections on Exile and Other Essays”, Harvard University Press, 2000).
