Salman Toor, an intimate and everyday gaze

At the Courtauld Gallery in London, Salman Toor: Someone Like You takes shape as the first major solo exhibition in Europe devoted to the Pakistani-American artist, active between Lahore and New York. The exhibition brings together a focused group of paintings and works on paper that allow a clear reading of a practice that has become increasingly central to contemporary figurative painting. Salman Toor’s work stages moments of everyday life, often intimate and suspended, populated by young queer men of South Asian origin. Domestic interiors, bars, urban streets and nocturnal settings become spaces of relationship, desire and vulnerability. The figures, caught in minimal gestures or silent pauses, seem to move within a fragile dimension in which identity is shaped through contact with others and through the act of being seen. Colour plays a decisive role. Acid tones, unnatural greens and artificial light contribute to an unstable atmosphere, far removed from descriptive realism. These chromatic choices heighten the emotional charge of the scenes and introduce a critical distance between image and reality, transforming personal episodes into broader reflections on belonging, exposure and urban solitude. The title of the exhibition, Someone Like You, suggests a double movement. On one hand it evokes the need for recognition and identification; on the other it opens onto a universal dimension, in which specific experiences become shareable. Toor’s painting does not seek empathy through exoticism or assertion, but through the ordinariness of situations in which the viewer can recognise themselves, even when the identities depicted have historically been marginalised.