The Masterstroke

Pakistani-origin, New York-based artist Salman Toor wants to paint a world where the East and West harmonise

Brooklyn, for Salman Toor, “is a community of conscientious small businesses, flourishing among graffitied industrial spaces, where people dress eccentrically and growing up is optional.” The NYC borough is also home to Toor’s studio: A cramped loft where a wall is studded with his paintings, both finished and in progress; and a makeshift shelf in a corner is piled high with paints and brushes, books and trophies, an opened bottle of champagne and paper.

This is where Toor, a 30-something, Lahoreborn artist who resides in the East Village, spends most of his day working alone – “until I miss my friends. Then I hang out at local dive bars with them, babbling away over drinks about our weekend woes, despairing over Trump’s latest tweet and the effect of living between cultures on our weirdly jeopardised and liberated inner selves.”

That in-betweener aura bleeds through Toor’s figurative paintings too. From a distance, his paintings – small scale and mostly done in oil on canvas – look like they belong to a long gone era, evoking the air-brushed detailing of Rubens or Vermeer. Look closer and you see his preoccupations are very much of our zeitgeist.

“In the past, my paintings were more about life in South Asia, the anxiety around class and caste,” says the Pratt Institute alumnus, who left Pakistan in the early 2000s to study art at Ohio Wesleyan. Now, he seeks to offer an intimate view into the lives of queer, brown men living in the US and South Asia.

This painting to the left, for instance, is called Lunch: A tondo panel featuring three friends, their skin and hair colour as individual as their fashion choices, draped in long snaky limbs and clergyman’s hats, feasting on coffee and pasta, and peering into a smartphone. When Toor put it up on his Instagram, he added hashtags like #feather, #queer and #reverie.