(slow music)
(phone dialer)
[Salman Toor, Artist]
(slow music)
["Salman Toor's Emerald Green"]
(phone rings)
- Hello.
[Father over phone] -Hello, how are you son?
[Toor] -All is well!
-What's going on with you?
I think I told you about this,
this small painting is going to a museum.
It's going to be hung next to historical paintings
from seventeenth-century Holland.
It's called the Frick museum.
To me, it is probably the best thing
that's ever going to happen, ever. (laughs)
So completely unimaginable,
like a couple of years ago.
So I'm just really excited.
(slow music)
Most of these paintings are based on memory
or the fantasy of memory of having grown up
in a kind of conservative place.
[Lahore, Pakistan, 1990]
(children singing)
Growing up as fem boy in a mostly homophobic culture,
it's exciting to put that next to
these pictures of ultra freedom.
(slow music)
In fact, it's kind of like annoyingly free.
I'm focusing on the idea that the freedoms
that we all to take for granted here
is pretty vulnerable.
(slow music)
So in 2002, when I moved here,
it was a complete transformation in my life
because I had never been to the States before.
I went straight to a college town.
To me, it was magical because everybody had long hair.
It was okay to be gay.
I was getting into European art history
for the first time.
(papers scratching)
It was an important painting to me
and I haven't looked at it for a long time.
So it's really, sort of, refined--
just really gay. (laughs)
Which is great
but like, you know,
in retrospect I would probably not have the cock in there.
It's like so gratuitous and it doesn't even have a shadow.
(people laughing)
[Man, off-screen] - It doesn't have a shadow.
[Toor] - Yeah it doesn't have a shadow.
(upbeat music)
I did a painting in 2019.
I had thought about it
and I knew what I was going to do
it was going to be like this nocturnal, late-night
apartment scene with these three guys having a cool time.
(upbeat music)
It was green and I was just so pleased with it.
(upbeat music)
There's something glamorous about emerald green
and something nocturnal, inviting.
(upbeat music)
I wanted to just explore that color for a while.
(upbeat music)
This particular thing that I do,
I think of them as "fag puddles."
They're sort of heaps of objects
and tubular body parts.
These body parts also have like,
just balls and just feet and it's hairy
and it's just all over the place.
I wanted to go into that surreal space
when I was going to show it in the Vermeer room at the Frick
because it's sort of fabulous, but also pathetic.
So I just wanted to use things
that in my imagination are personal symbols--
a kind of installation of made-up busts
that look vaguely Buddhist or European.
So, you know, these drawings are really
just about mapping out a composition.
(piano music)
(subway passing)
(piano music)
The paintings are peppered with
nightmarish scenarios that are based on anxieties
(piano music)
and the kind of movement between
being an empowered new person in the city, but also,
moments of disempowerment
and maybe even humiliation. (laughs)
Your work, I just love the confidence in it.
It's just, it's so flowy
[Doron Langberg, artist]
when you use the rainbow as an emblem.
["Salman" by Doron Langberg]
[Doron Langberg] - When you painted me, I feel you captured
something so specific.
[Toor] The paintings are a reflection
of most of the conversations I have with my friends.
Queer friendships about young, fem guys
involved or ensconced in cosmopolitan culture.
(upbeat music)
- And then this is the other one.
[Visitor] - And there's also a drawing, correct?
[Toor] - Yes, the drawing is here.
(car engine roaring)
(footsteps)
Both of us love the stuff in here.
We look at a lot of it,
a lot of our inspiration comes from these historical works.
It's a really surreal thing to be a part of something
that can seem like a bit of an ivory tower sometimes.
(slow music)
[Langberg] This is what we were looking at,
like, all of our lives.
Thinking of them as just a continuous language
and history,
and having that in direct conversation
is something that I didn't necessarily think would happen.
(laughing)
[Toor] Being from a post-colonial country
where the encounter with Europe changed
and transformed that region.
It's kind of like coming back full circle, in a sense.
And it feels really, really important and poetic.
(upbeat music)