I always wonder what a contemporary artist must feel when they get a solo show at The Courtauld in London. I thought this when I saw Peter Doig’s show there a few years ago but surely felt it when I walked into Salman Toor’s exhibition, Someone Like You, last week. You walk past Modigliani’s Female Nude (just jaw-dropping and intimate as a painting can get) , Van Gogh’s 1889 self-portrait (the detail on the peacoat is astounding), even Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (which is one of the greatest figurative paintings ever if you ask me), and as you make sense of some of the greatest figurative works from one of the greatest periods of 40 years of painting ever, you come into a room full of works from the now. And in Toor’s case, the now feels like the past. His work feels substantially in its right place at this small palace of art, one of the great collections in the world. Salman Toor has both arrived and will remain in the pantheon of greats for years to come. This, to me, is one of the most exciting revelations of the year.
That Manet is the key, really. One of Toor’s best-known paintings, The Bar on East 13th (2019), is his answer to A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, and now the two hang under the same roof. Manet gave us a barmaid behind a marble counter, the oranges and the champagne bottles glowing in front of her, the whole of Paris roaring in the mirror at her back, and on her face the most private expression in nineteenth-century painting. She is surrounded and she is completely alone. Toor moves the bar to downtown New York, floods it in green, and puts a stylish, androgynous young man where she stood, cutting a lemon while the night carries on behind him. It isn’t a parody and it isn’t a homage exactly. It is a conversation, and walking from one to the other you realise the question Manet was asking (what does it feel like to be looked at all night and seen by no one?) never went away. It just found new faces.
That, to me, is the whole essence of Toor. He doesn’t borrow imagery from Old Masters; he borrows their questions.
Then there is the green. You cannot write about Toor without the green, and honestly I don’t want to. Since 2019 he has painted his shadows in it, and whole rooms seem to sit in that emerald haze, somewhere between a nightclub and an aquarium. He has talked about the colour as nocturnal, and about how it carries two meanings at once: glamour and poison. Blue, he has said, belongs to Picasso. Green is his. And it is the right colour for this building, if you think about it. Emerald green was, quite literally, poison in the nineteenth century, an arsenic pigment that coloured wallpapers and dresses across Europe. Green was the color of absinthe, the drink of Manet’s Paris and of the café nights Van Gogh painted. So when Toor drowns a party or a bar in green, he is reaching back to that same world, the beautiful, dangerous night. For the young men in his paintings the night is where freedom lives. It is also where the risk lives. The green holds both, and it never lets you forget either.
What moved me most, though, is how the show swings between togetherness and being alone. Some of the paintings are crowded and warm. In Three Men in a Taxi (2021) you are basically squeezed into the back seat with three friends, knees touching, the city blurring past. These are pictures of queer brown men as the default, not the exception, gangly and camp and affectionately drawn, and many of them are Toor’s actual friends, painted from memory. There is so much love in them. Then you turn around and there is Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug (2019), a lone traveller at US border control, his face creams and phone charger suddenly under suspicion, and the room goes quiet. And Twilight Story (2023), drawn from his childhood home in Lahore, is both tender and ominous at the same time, the feeling of growing up queer somewhere you couldn’t say so.
The painter I kept thinking of was Watteau, whom Toor has named as one of his heroes along with Van Dyck, Rubens and Caravaggio. Watteau painted parties, the fêtes galantes, lovers and musicians in a park in soft light. But nobody really looks happy in a Watteau, do they? There is always a sadness underneath, a sense that the music is about to stop and everyone will have to go home. Toor’s apartment parties have that same melancholy. The joy is real, and it is also fragile, made in rooms that had to be found and friendships that had to be chosen. Intimacy, romance, friendship, loneliness: in Toor’s paintings they are never separate. They sit in the same room, under the same green light.
And then there are the Fag Puddles, which might be the bravest paintings in the show. They are still lifes, really, teetering heaps of things from Toor’s past, the “sissy things” (his words) he loved as a boy and was made to feel ashamed of. Shame turned into a pile of objects, painted with such care that it becomes something closer to tenderness. The Courtauld already owns one, Fag Puddle in Vitrine (2021), and for this show he made a new one, Fag Puddle with Carriers (2026), modelled on Lorenzo Lotto’s The Entombment from the Courtauld’s own collection. Think about that for a second. A painting of a body being carried to the grave, the most solemn scene in Christian art, reimagined by a queer Pakistani painter as a pile of the things he was told not to love. It is funny and it is mournful and it is completely serious about both. That is exactly what the Old Masters did with their grief, and Toor knows it.
So does he belong with the greats? I think the Courtauld answers that better than I can, simply by putting him there. What makes Manet and Van Gogh and Modigliani great isn’t their technique alone, it’s that they painted the people around them with such honesty that a century later we still feel we know them. The barmaid, the man with the bandaged ear, the nude with her eyes closed. Toor does the same for his own people, young queer men far from home, finding each other in taxis and bars and borrowed apartments, laughing, dancing, sometimes sitting very alone at the end of the night. Born in Lahore in 1983 and working in New York, he is painting a life that the Old Masters never painted, using everything they taught him.
And his hand is still changing. In the newer works, like The Joke (2024), the brushwork loosens, the figures become almost ghostly, as if he is stepping back from the canvas to see what else it can hold. That excites me most of all. He has arrived, yes. But he isn’t finished. And I can’t wait to see what the next room looks like.
Text by Evan Pricco
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