Salman Toor & the Clown
The feeling of happiness produced by indulgence of a wild, untamed craving is incomparably more intense than is the satisfying of a curbed desire.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
In visiting Salman Toor’s small but superb exhibition No Ordinary Love at the Baltimore Museum of Art, I was struck by images asking to be seen musically and picturesquely, without quibbles, syllogisms or deductions. They evoke the great delight of one who drowns his gaze in the grandeur of reveries, in the vastness of the sea or the sky. I walked by chance into the small room at the back, following the spell of a few Mattisses that had excited my imagination. After the exquisite gentleness of those odalisques, I first saw two little pictures — one lit softly with uniform creams, the other of a dramatic green chiaroscuro — depicting a little boy's perceptions of his mother and father. She, naked and absorbed in her toilette, seemed regal and indifferent, sensuous and burlesque, showcasing her body to a tenderhearted boy full of admiration and desire; he, carrying a baby in his arms, is spiritual rather than carnal, a figure stolen from Watteau’s entourage, who in the solemnity of nature is given to sublime contemplation. The boy wants to be her, to replace her role; and thus not so much her body but the objects around her are filled with the energy of color; the father’s, to the contrary, is a picture of a sentiment rather than a narrative, a moment of penetrating intensity, from which nothing of nature remains after its dissolution in the imagination.
Salman Toor, Mommy, 2021. Oil on canvas. Collection of the artist, and Luhring Augustine, New York.
The other images in the room pursued the boy’s experiences of infancy, what we ambivalently remember as the building blocks of a developing character: when euphoric, driven by the madness of some unknown memory, we ran blissfully into the rain and let its waters wash our naked body in almost foolish pleasure (Thunderstorm, 2021); when with a distant cousin’s friend, whom we had never met, we left the sobriety and decorum of the adults’ gathering and discovered far away the rewards of pleasure (Back Lawn, 2021). They are set on dream-like landscapes, where the spatial connections between figures — their size and placement, even the way they embody time — is unreal and arbitrarily composed: driven by a spiritual urge rather than by observation. And yet, Toor remains absorbed by an attraction for lurid and mysterious scenes. Part of the charm of paintings like Stone Throwers (2021) and Night Capture (2022) — accentuated by their swirling strokes and pithy coloring — is our identification with victim and executor; our delight in the demand to enjoy our defenselessness against vicious conspiracies and unleash our thirst for violence. They are fascinated by those fleeting, delicious sensations whose vagueness does not prevent them from being intense; penetrating enough even to be painful. The final effect is a mingling of expressionist handling and an illustrative outlook, concerned, as it were, through the eyes of fantasy, with holding together the spiritualistic and sensualistic trends of the age.
Salman Toor, The Stone Throwers, 2021. Oil on Canvas. Collection of the artist, and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Light, dust, cries, happiness, uproar. In the following rooms, large and majestic canvases are the products of sexual dreams and innocent perversions, or the impressions of the meaningless roles forced upon our sweet boy once he grew up. He remained always a dreamer (Seated Boy with a Sneaker, 2021). In the city, he pursued his desire for others in the dissoluteness of nightclubs, alone, seeking his way in crowds of graceful beauty, whom he wished to possess (The Latecomer, 2021). There he loved some while walking away with others. (Walking Together, 2019). He is an aesthete whose love for hedonism is naïve and heroic. The most splendid canvases in the exhibition reach the greatest ecstasies of erotic beauty (Construction Guys, 2021; Fag Puddle with Candle, Shoe and Flag, 2021). This latter, one of the centerpieces of the show, is said to be inspired by Anthony Van Dyck’s Rinaldo and Armida, and indeed like its predecessor, it manifests the sympathies of murder and love, weaving, in its display of disjointed bodies, the ultimatum of physical experience, an impossible longing for immediacy and unity, with the mundane reality of irreversible mutilation.
Salman Toor, Fag Puddle with Candle, Shoe and Flag, 2021. Collection of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
The counterpart to this erotic obsession is a feeling of narcissitic futility, the emptiness of the role one is forced to play in a world that does not provide, and never will, a satisfactory fulfillment to fantasy. Exiled from the enjoyments of everyday life, our aesthete and his like-minded friends formed a clownish coterie, frail and ruined (The Inheritors, 2022). What have they inherited if not the boredom and baseness of our modern age? Their experience now becomes mere witnessing, where neither the subject nor the object is transformed but instead regresses into thing-like isolation, or a thingly identification (The Witness, 2021; Museum Boys, 2021). In their misery, they neither weep, nor cry, nor shout; they sing neither a merry song nor a sad one; they do not supplicate. They are mute and motionless. They have abdicated. And their destiny is now over.
Salman Toor, Museum Boys, 2021. Oil on panel. Collection of Scott Mueller.
When I began looking at these paintings, there were many ideas and pictures hovering over my eyes and nurturing the joy of my imagination. Rembrandt for one was there, in every wild face of the little boy, in every meandering outline and evocative shadow. Watteau’s surfaces and subtle turns, the delicate arrangements of Mughal planes, the poetic brightness of the baroque — they were all there attending to their part in the charming totality of Toor’s art. But when I turn around and analyze my obsession with these visions, I can but repeat to myself the lines of Baudelaire:
Beauty, you walk on corpses of dead men you mock.
Among your store of gems, Horror is not the least;
Murder, amid the dearest trinkets of your stock,
Dances on your proud belly like a ruttish beast.
From Satan or from God? Who cares? Fierce or serene,
Who cares? Sister to sirens or to seraphim?
So but, dark fey, you shed your perfume, rhythm and sheen
To make the world less hideous and Time less grim.
Salman Toor, The Latecomer, 2021, Oil on panel. Collection of John Auerbach and Ed Tang.
