Salman Toor’s Emerald Green | Art21 “New York Close Up“

How does a painter put freedom and vulnerability on the same canvas? In a light-filled Bushwick studio, painter Salman Toor calls his father to let him know that “one of the best things that’s ever going to happen, ever“ is on the horizon. Toor is at work on a new figurative painting, “Museum Boys“ (2021), to be presented alongside canvases by Johannes Vermeer at Frick Madison in New York City. The painting is the latest in the artist’s alternately tender and comic exploration of his own highly cultured queer community, imagining moments of quiet intimacy as well as scenes of public violence and repression. Moving from his home country of Pakistan to the United States in 2002, the artist had his first experience in an openly gay community while also coming under the influence of Western figurative art traditions like Dutch Golden Age painting. Working on multiple small canvases at the the same time, Toor paints images of queer sociality: “femme“ and fashionable you