Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love

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Alessandrini, Christopher (2019-05-18). " 'Boys Do It Better': The Paintings of Louis Fratino". The New York Review of Books . Retrieved 2019-06-13.

No Ordinary Love: A New Exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of No Ordinary Love: A New Exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of

Feinstein mentioned that her mother had recently met Toor on a flight to Miami. “The plane had landed,” Toor explained. “We were waiting to move out, and a lady across the aisle was talking to her seatmate about her daughter, Rachel, an artist who was married to an artist, and I had to say something.” When Toor graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, in 2006, he went to New York. Komail Aijazuddin was still at N.Y.U., living in a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, and Toor and Ali Sethi, who had just graduated from Harvard, moved in with him. Toor got a job in the marketing department of a now defunct art magazine. It was the only job he ever had. “Within a couple of months, I felt like I was wasting my time,” he told me. “I didn’t have any time to paint, so I just stopped. I applied to a bunch of grad schools, and got into Pratt. Incredibly, my father decided to pay for it. I did tell him that this level of education would make it easier for me to make a living. But I’m still surprised.My high-school friend’s parents collected art, and had libraries; my parents are not really readers. So I had access to the deliciousness of art monographs – Caravaggio and stuff like that. But my grandmother had a bunch of prints of paintings. She had a portrait of this white woman in a grey dress and grey hair, standing against a stone column; I found out later, when I went to college, that it was The Honourable Mrs Graham by Thomas Gainsborough. I just remember feeling something seeing these artists from Europe: from another part of the world, from a completely different time. There was a sense of this very tragic heroism – of finding both the romantic and the grisly. That was very valuable.

Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love Open November 16 at Rose Art

Toor makes much of his dual identities: growing up as a queer youth in Lahore, Pakistan, and later moving to New York City. While his work has plenty of softness and whimsy, there are undercurrents of strangeness that verges on the unsettling. Clown noses, marionette strings, and ill-fitted theatrical costumes suggest alienation and the tragic-comic. Figures occasionally stand alone in crowded rooms or are isolated by color and lighting from their fellows. This sense of isolation in one of the most recent works in the show and one of the only works that eschew the human figure: Cemetery with Dog, 2022. The loping, smeared white dog in Cemetery with Dog evokes Francis Bacon’s Study for a Running Dog, c. 1954. Bacon’s mangy dogs also emerged at a moment of cross-cultural alienation, emerging after a trip to South Africa. In both works, the dogs suggest the uncanny realization that the benign and familial can take on an ominous quality when removed from its happy, familiar context. Toor’s works invert historical traditions in art and feature queer and brown individuals as a way to explore outdated concepts of power and the way in which it is presented through art. Toor was born in Pakistan, and his works are a mesh of his religious upbringing as well as his sexuality. Toor looks to give representation to individuals that are otherwise missing from historical art canon. “No Ordinary Love” is a vibrant proclamation of love depicted in various ways. It’s a continuation. I have been thinking of doing things like video, so we might see something like that. And I am finishing a graphic novel that I started with a friend seven years ago. I like the medium of painting, but the stories in the painting are equally important to me.

Using a signature palette of rich emerald greens, Toor’s paintings are infused with both melancholy and glamour. These moody depictions amplify small moments of existence, blending vulnerability, desire, violence and celebration in compositions based on Toor’s imagination. Vivid brushstrokes radiate throughout the canvas, creating an atmospheric distance that suggests both intimacy and isolation. Salman Toor (born 1983) is a Pakistani painter based in the United States. His works depict the imagined lives of young men of South Asian-birth, displayed in close range in either South Asia and New York City fantasized settings. [1] Toor lives and works in New York City. Exchange Show, Montclair University MFA Gallery, Montclair, New Jersey Pratt MFA Thesis Show, Stueben Gallery, Brooklyn [28]