Someone Like You, Courtauld Gallery - London.
Salman Toor, The Bar on East 13th (2019), Oil on panel, 91.4 x 121.9cm, Private Collection. © Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo Genevieve Hanson.
Salman Toor’s proposals of reconfigured portraits, historically atmospheric, sample like a mixtape of reimagined anthems. Gossip made permanent in paint on canvas, a medium associated with the serious and noble, and so to see Toors' depictions of the flirt, the flight and the fallen is a wholehearted testament to the 'finally'.
As a single album, his ninteen presented works are often reconfigurations of icons from the Courtauld gallery's permanent collection. This metaphorical act of mirroring is key to viewing the exhibition as a whole - to re-imagine a future for himself which is not reflected in art history's checkered past, where scenes are historically devoid of same sex couples, openly romanticising a human's dance for love and life. The artist's reconfiguring of space, time and representation is echoed within the exhibition's host - the Courtauld's invitation to Toor is symbolic of a palpable sense of review, continuing to pass through international collections.
Salman Toor, Ghost Ball (2023), Oil on linen, 190.8 x 323.2cm, Pinault Collection. © Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo Farzad Owrang.
Toor's gentle figures sway and glide across his planes of verdant saturation as a mass of mythical beings, whose existence appears as ephemeral yet potent as witnessing a procession of phantoms - as a fable forgotten since childhood. A stark reminder of the invisible trade we all face, of a soul sold in return for the accreditation of adulthood.
And it is here that the artist's brilliance is potently felt, in his generosity and courage to not only present works which are full to a meniscus edge with emotion, an arc from the adrenaline-swept highs of intoxication to the pounding, returning lows of rejection. Sensed within the exhausted pile-up of multiple bodies as the debris of being dumped in a heap. An echo to Philip Guston's 'Flatlands', where a plethora of seemingly abandoned objects and disjointed body parts appear thrown from a great height - described within the artist's cartoonish, tragically comedic, and thickly direct visual tone. Toor, more delicate in his approach, described in feathered brushstrokes, a scene somehow even more vulnerable - despite a body still recognisable as being intact from the outside; an anatomy appears to have collapsed from within - crumpled as a discarded rag-doll, the depiction of a final surrender.
Toor's green period, surely a nod to Picasso's rose and blue, evokes the nocturnal barlight of fluorescent freedom - as to be bathed in an Absinthe hue - where all races become alien, and the outsider becomes central to a seemingly endless proposition of nighttime adventure. Where possibility and probability unite without the threat of the cold light of day exposing reality’s returning sobriety. A realisation that the fantasy of the free is not open to all. Toor’s Edens without Eve are paradises of the frolicking flamboyant, re-enacted for those whose version of the story is historically condemned to the ostracised, the victimised and in many cases, still, the illegal.
Salman Toor, Fag Puddle with Carriers (2026), Oil on panel, 68.6 x 99.1cm, Private Collection. © Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo Farzad Owrang.
Panorama of Courtauld Gallery, Salman Toor, Someone Like You. 7th October, 16:20. Collage: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2026.
Salman Toor, Someone Like You, Courtauld Gallery - London. Until 10 Januray, 2027.
With thanks to Caitlin Brooker and Sahil Betigeri.