"Toor’s commitment to portraying these worlds holistically and with dignity... is best exemplified by “Four Friends” (2019), where the subject is not depicted as other, but as a whole unto himself, experiencing freedom in a moment of dance and uninhibited joy."
Enticing, glamorous, and yet somehow intensely quotidian, Four Friends from 2019 stands as one of Salmon Toor’s most celebrated and powerful paintings. As with all the best of Toor’s works, the painting highlights intimate, vulnerable moments in the lives of fictional and fashionable young queer Brown men ensconced in a utopic contemporary urban life. Rendered in Toor’s signature emerald green and painterly, tactile, glossy brushstrokes, the nocturnal fantasy of Toor’s imagined subjects invites the viewer to participate in the motion and rhythm of the painting. While the present work is not autobiographical, it draws from Toor’s lived experiences between New York City and South Asia, combining his cultural background and sexual identity to create an intimate portrait. Four Friends features two men entranced, candidly and openly swaying to the beat, free of any impositions placed upon them by the outside world. We simultaneously see two other men mesmerized by a phone, simultaneously engaged with the present, in touch as they are with a vast digital audience, and divorced from it, living outside the scene in which they find themselves. Four Friends thus perfectly embodies the idea of opposition, juxtaposition, and contradiction that is vital to Toor’s oeuvre.
In 2020-2021, Salman Toor had a widely acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Salman Toor: How Will I Know, in which Four Friends was a key highlight. In her review of the show, Isabel Ling writes that Toor’s paintings create a sense of intimacy through a holistic and dignified portrayal of his figures which is “…best exemplified by “Four Friends” (2019), where the subject is not depicted as other, but as a whole unto himself, experiencing freedom in a moment of dance and uninhibited joy.” (Isabel Lang, “Salman Toor’s Dreamy Scenes Imagine the Queer, South Asian Everyday”, Hyperallergic, 1 December 2020) Several elements of Four Friends distinguish it as one of the standout paintings of Toor’s career: the flamboyant central figure, the energetic movement, the lush interior apartment scene, the smartphone and glow of technology, the focus on the Brown queer figures, and the emerald green palette.
Speaking about this choice of color, Toor comments: “One of the things I like about green is that it can be very hot and very cold. Blue is cold, and it belongs to Picasso. With green, there’s a flickering light that’s nocturnal, and poisonous (think of absinthe), and also jewel-like—emeralds and jade.” (Calvin Tomkins, “How Salman Toor Left the Old Masters Behind,” The New Yorker, 1 August 2022 (online)) Toor purposefully uses this color to combine juxtaposing elements and conjure this mysterious, glamorous world, where Brown queer men are able perform their identity in safety and comfort.
"Art history has formed my imaginary map of the world, conquests, migrations, ideas of civilization, foreignness, and fashion. I like seeing the thread of the past in the present.”
At the start of his career, Toor studied Old Master portrait and landscape painting, which remains a cornerstone of his practice in style and subject. Toor states, “Art history has formed my imaginary map of the world, conquests, migrations, ideas of civilization, foreignness, and fashion. I like seeing the thread of the past in the present.” (Cassie Packard, “Blurring the Lines between Public and Private: Salman Toor Interviewed by Cassie Packard,” BOMB, 12 February 2021) Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1983, Toor moved to America in 2002 for university and there found a queer culture unlike any he had experienced before. The pronounced contrast between his experience of conservative Pakistan and that of a liberal college campus allowed him to understand the queer community from the perspective of both outsider and insider. It is this tension that led Roberta Smith observe that his paintings “begin to pluck at your heartstrings almost as soon as you see them.” (Roberta Smith, “Salman Toor: A Painter at Home in Two Worlds,” The New York t.mes s, 23 December 2020 (online))
Toor combines academic technique and an incredible knowledge of art history with lived experience and commentary on contemporary society in order to communicate narratives of public and private life in the queer diasporic identity. The thick, tender, gestural strokes on every painting create a fluid scene where each element is interconnected into the next. Toor is writing himself into the canon of art history and furthering it by highlighting the marginalized and othered figures throughout history; the works are at once defiant and deeply vulnerable. In doing so, Toor upends this canon to include individuals who have been ignored for centuries. Toor’s style communicates “empathy through the language of painting,” and although each canvas is imaginary and utopic, the scenes are never idealistic.
Salman Toor's Emerald Green | Art21 "New York Close Up"
