Salmantor needed a better perspective.
Slowly retreats from the easel, the 42-year-old artist closes one eye and gives a thumbs up. He arched his back, gaining a few more centimeters further away and stood upright. Anger led to acceptance. He filled his doubts and raised paintbrushes again. Emerald green portrait of his mysterious man in heart-shaped sunglasses.
On a March morning, the walls were covered in dozens of new drawings, paintings and etchings Tor has created over the past few years, anticipating the biggest exhibition ever, “Wish Maker,” which will be held on May 2nd across Ruling Augustine's two galleries in Manhattan. The purpose of this show is to reintroduce an artist born in Lahore, Pakistan, as one of the most fascinating painters of his generation, allowing old European techniques to be remixed into modern scenes of queer desire and immigration experiences.
This was my first chance to see everything in one room, deciding which photos he was comfortable displaying when his work became more politically conflicted and emotionally raw.
“I have a long-lasting question,” the artist said. “What am I doing here in America?”
Receiving US citizenship in 2019 and committing to life in New York felt like he was leaving his family behind to some extent. His parents were supportive, but they remained far away. He has never shown that he has never actually seen one of his major shows about his candid portrayal of strange sexuality against the conservative community of Pakistan.
“It's too long to understand conceptual distance,” Thor explained of his parents.
These boundaries remain fixed, despite Toor celebrities growing up in an international circle entitled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners everywhere” shortly after last year's Venice Biennale. At the exhibition, he presented his painting septet. He said it was “the feeling of empowerment, sometimes the humiliation of moving from one culture to another, and the cost of freedom for someone like me.”
Biennale curator Adriano Pedrosa said Thor has a unique style. “I think it's a very overlapping job,” he said. “It's not that easy. It's sexy. Sometimes even violent. But on the other hand, it's a gorgeous picture.”
But along with his global fanbase there is a new level of pressure on himself to exceed expectations.
“My life was once very small,” Thor said. Its soft features and calming voice make you feel like you're stepping into his studio and entering the office of some of Brooklyn's finest therapists. “I didn't have my own room until I was 21.”
House Echo
Toor's first breakthrough came in 2020 when he introduced his audience to unique style, self-exercise humor and autobiographical scenes at a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The show was a hit, and 15 of its works were seasoned with emerald tones, which were signed by the artist. Written in The New York Times, art critic Roberta Smith said, “The atmosphere of these paintings is more reflective, yet more comedic than ever, even if things become ominous.”
Two years later, his painting, dubbed “Four Friends,” sold at auction for nearly $1.6 million.
He then became overexposed and became another young artist whose career was caught up in the boom in art speculation and bust economics. Tours visits his family in the sunny city, largely retreating from the commercial aspects of the art world, focusing on paintings in his studio and makeshift spaces in Lahore. His colour palette has become more diverse, including more ocean blue, yellow acid, red curvature, and more. His line work became more and more irritated by his customs.
“My hands were following the same kind of face and the same kind of body,” Toor said. “At some point, I had to revert the movement to copy myself. Sometimes I have to take a step back and ask what I'm doing?”
Back at home last summer, Toor recalls the reason he left Pakistan. The country still criminalizes homosexuality, which involves potential fines and sentences ranging from two years for sexual conduct to lifetime imprisonment, although the law is not strictly enforced. And despite his long-term relationship with renowned artist and Pakistani singer Ali Seti, he feels discouraged from expressing his identity there.
“Bringing home really rejuvenates me,” said Toor, who painted four canvases during his visit last summer.
When he graduated from the Platt Institute in Brooklyn in 2009, Toor painted as if he were an apprentice to Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini. He had begun to create classic portraits of his friends, including strange paint graffiti on his head. That's when Katherine Redmond, his painting professor at Pratt, knew something was about to change. His brushstrokes were becoming more and more about him, not about the Renaissance.
“Then the green painting came,” she said. “Green is a very difficult color because it automatically has red (opposite the color wheel). It's a very raw color. It's difficult to control. So, when you're looking at one of his green paintings, you don't even know that your brain is actually seeing red.”
The darkness that once simmered beneath the surface of his paintings was now beginning to pass through the canvas. Currently, it can be seen under the title “Night Cemetery,” one of his most memorable photos, on the brightest corner of his studio. It depicts an Islamic cemetery floating in the blackness of the universe. It took me two years to complete the job. This gained new relevance in response to the war in Gaza, Thor said.
“I wanted to retreat into this peaceful, ghostly space,” Thor said. “Where was this ancestors, I wanted to run away to this place for dinner and think about the idea of death.”
The larger paintings plague Tours, who prefer to work on a more intimate scale. He missed the deadline to include large-scale works at the 2024 Venice Biennale and must hold back another unfinished giant from his upcoming exhibitions, the New York street scene and the New York Street scene of brownstone and hanky construction workers.
“It was hell,” Thor said.
The small image allows him to focus on singular themes such as belongings, memory, failure, sex, comedy. However, the artist needs greater complexity in his larger paintings, and is the standard of integrity that drives the entire depth of human experience, the ambition.
New confidence
Six years ago, Toor was still transporting paintings in garbage bags around New York, waiting for the art world to attract attention. His paintings are currently available in galleries ranging from $50,000 to $300,000 or more, depending on the size. According to his gallerist, Donald Johnson Montenegro of Ruling Augustine, the drawings will be sold between $20,000 and $90,000.
However, the artist remembers his struggles as he built a community of queer artists in New York, including Deron Langberg and Somnas Batt.
Those friends' faint people appear in his paintings. For example, the mystery man in heart-shaped sunglasses traded his paintings for Thor in 2019, with the same curly hair and wide eyes as Langberg, tied to a figly approach to painting.
“When I visit Salman's studio, it's funny,” Langberg said. “He shows me pictures I find completely stunning.
Langberg continues. “He has very specific ideas about what he wants from his paintings, and I don't think he's motivated by perfectionism.
A few weeks after his studio visit, Toor revealed that he had returned to Mystery Man, adjusted his sunglasses and added a white scarf.
The new painting evokes a bouncing emotion between intimacy and alienation. Azure photos remind us of Toor's recent trip to Paris. There, a friend brought him to a restaurant that looked more like a tourist trap than an oat dish. The wait staff were glaged in frustration while they shed tears and laughed at themselves.
“It was like a fake fantasy space,” Thor said. “And they wanted us to get us out of there. We were these three brown guys who were drunk and drunk.”
Toa enjoys a big laugh. His preconceived notion of absurdity appears in the pink clown's nose that appears in his paintings about a particular male character. “I wanted them to be a bit sad, funny and pathetic,” he said. “They have something really sweet, and it makes me feel like I want to help this clown.”
He tastes the tragic sense of timing as a clown, his ability to absorb anxiety and release it as a laugh. That's part of why he rolls one of the clown's bulbous noses under the floor in a recent painting in his “FAG PUDDLE” series, where the body parts that melt together like a microwave wax candle, theatrical costumes and technology melt.
Previous examples of the Metropolitan Museum of Art collections on display at the Contemporary Art Gallery are even more clear. It features a man who accepts the other man's gro cascade as a swirl of his body parts, surrounds the man who surrounds the feather boa and pearls. As the artist explained, “great.” This image provides a messy representation of strange desires and failure. And the strangest part of this dreamy tableau is the smartphone depicted around it, as if the scene had been recorded.
Toor explained that his own desire for safety comes from the intense feelings of vulnerability that he grew up in Pakistan. Art history at the time was a shelter. Photos of masters implemented like Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens became ambitious, and by tracking those images, Toor felt that he was part of something bigger.
However, the new painting shows that Tor does not need the old master. His paintings were rendered in a clear style and moved with a new confidence.
“I'm part of that story right now,” he said.
Wish Maker
Until June 21, 2025, at Ruhring Augustine Chelsea at 531 West 24th Street, 17 White Street, 531 West 24th Street and Luhring Augustine Tribeca. luhringaugustine.com.
