Featured in Salman Toor’s Cosmopolitan Queer Life
The artist s first institutional solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art explores lives of Brown, queer subjects through a scrim of nostalgia
I don’t remember precisely when I first saw Salman Toor’s paintings but I do distinctly remember how I felt in that moment: a particular flash of recognition, a momentary illumination that results from seeing and being seen. In his scenes of the lives of queer people of colour, Toor extends this evanescent flash onto the quotidian activities of his androgynous Brown subjects, who gather for parties in cramped apartments and spend evenings at crowded bars or alone in bed. Along with Doron Langberg and Anthony Cudahy, Toor joins a cohort of queer figurative artists negotiating the history of painting and the contemporary developments that condition their subjectivity. Though Toor eschews the formal innovation of such painters as Jonathan Lyndon-Chase, rendering h