The artist’s paintings test and probe the thresholds (real and imagined) that shape the queer and migrant experience, holding and proposing unruly ideas
‘The border is the locus of resistance, of rupture, of implosion and explosion, and of putting together the fragments and creating new assemblages,’ writes Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa in the posthumously published treatise Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro (2015). The border, or threshold in his own words, is a conceptual keystone across the narrative painting practice of Pakistani-American artist Salman Toor. It appears in one painting as the beguiling gaze of an androgynous bartender over a countertop; in another as the screen that shines blue light upon the reclining naked body of a young brown man. The most frontal and, one might say, most critical translation of the threshold appears in a sensitive body of works that foreground the bodies of immigrants at airport checkpoints. Having moved to the US from Lahore in 2002, Toor draws from personal as well as communal experiences of harsh, often dehumanising border controls and racial profiling in the wake of 9/11. Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug (2019) shows a brown-skinned man with downcast eyes, doggedly looking at his belongings scattered across the counter before him, as if willing back together the pieces of his shattered dignity. The painting implicates us across its threshold, created ‘from the perspective of the immigration officer so that the viewer’s gaze fuses with theirs’, writes Ambika Trasi in her essay for Toor’s 2020 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, New York. Man with Face Creams… is one among almost 40 paintings and drawings, spanning from 2019 to the present, on show as part of Toor’s first institutional show in Europe, at London’s Courtauld Gallery. The show’s curator, Elena Crippa, points to the timely emotive duality that the work contends with: ‘our pressing need to belong as much as experiences of exclusion’.
In his recent works, the artist probes this tension further. The threshold takes on an even more amorphous form, shapeshifting into a portal, collapsing into a puddle. Piles of surreal bric-a-brac – a feather boa becomes a tentacular body for a decapitated head, a piss-filled homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) perched atop a curled man sleeping in a museum vitrine, buttocks and thighs illuminated by a naked lightbulb referencing Philip Guston – have become recurrent passages in his scenes, elements that come together the way a poem holds unruly ideas. When asked about their origins over a Zoom call, the artist laughs and suggests an unlikely reference. Rather than Vermeer, Rembrandt and other European masters he often cites as inspirations, Toor points instead towards the 1980s–90s My Little Pony toys that went on to become a successful cartoon franchise – the latter a totem of his childhood memory. His drooping assemblages take their shape from Smooze, a mutating purple slime that, in the cartoons, overflows and threatens to smother the Ponies’ town with its viscous form. It is partly from this oozing image that each congregation of parts and things gets its name – fag puddles. Fag is short for faggot, the reclaimed slur used for gay men who did not conform to traditional codes of masculinity. Puddle, when queer-coded, calls on the image of the cuddle puddle, an act of intimacy – sometimes wet, but very often platonic – enjoyed in queer kinship spaces.
The elements in Toor’s fag puddles hold multiple, sometimes contradictory energies. The comfortable safety of the cuddle puddle sits alongside a certain kind of limpness that can be read as emblematic of resignation or failure. In that, it is reminiscent of the fatigue that queer, racialised, migrant and other nonhegemonic bodies carry when navigating a social structure that considers them an outsider or afterthought. “I like to think of them as props for code-switching,” Toor explains, borrowing a term that was initially coined in 1954 by sociolinguist Einar Haugen to describe the interplay of languages in multilingual speech, and then mobilised during the 1970s to understand relations between people of colour in general and Black people in particular in the US. During the 2010s, it entered popular consciousness through Black cultural routes such as the sketch comedy series Key & Peele and has since then been adopted to encompass a range of cultural attitudes that allow us to ‘align and unify among familiar groups in certain settings’, as described by journalist Ida Harris, very often as a manoeuvre for safety or a tactic to access gatekept resources. Toor’s fag puddles propose a visual language for the metaphoric toolkit of behaviours and syntax that we might reach into to modulate our queerness or brownness, as demanded by different social settings – for instance, the mores within the walls of the type of museum within which you might encounter his paintings as opposed to the house parties portrayed within their frames.
Fag puddles first appeared in Parts and Things (2019), before they were christened by the artist. A subsequent rendition, Fag Puddle in Vitrine (2021), an ink-and-gouache drawing on paper, was acquired by the Courtauld in 2024, and became an indirect impetus for the current show – which also features a new work, Fag Puddle with Carriers (2026). The puddle takes centre stage in another recent painting commissioned for House of Nisaba: New Stories of Painting, curated by Hendrik Folkerts at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Toor’s largest work yet, The Studio (2026), unmistakably, and beautifully, cites Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Choosing an allegorical approach, Toor places before an easel an oddball figure – a hobo crusader, as he describes the recurrent character – with brown skin and facial features much like the artist’s, wearing no pants and just one shoe. Toor playfully nods to the seductive emerald hue that has become a mainstay of many of his paintings by including an assistant holding up a fluorescent green light, illuminating the subjects of the painting, who stand against a green screen. Unlike the royal family in the seventeenth-century work, Toor centres one of his leaking assemblages, in which two prominent blue candles imbue the scene with what the artist describes as a ritualistic character. Standing in front of the fag puddle we see numerous figures lined up, waiting, as if ceremonially, to retrieve or deposit an offering. “This painting was made at a time when the genocide in Gaza was foremost on everyone’s mind,” the artist elaborates. “It was a time when a studio practice felt not that meaningful, and the scene depicts that sense of depression where ghosts haunt the site of making.” The artist sees them as ancestral spirits that haunt, but also alleviate some of the heaviness of our increasingly divisive times. Their movement bestows new mutability and collective access to the fag puddles. The assemblages are not only static collections through which the artist rummages to find a socially appropriate mask to modulate his queerness or brownness. Here, Toor alchemises the puddles into communal sites – cultural repositories that hold generational wisdom required to survive between borders and batons. They function as archives that facilitate the balance between our hypervigilance in a hostile world and our need to find a home in which we might synthesise the shards of our multihyphenated selves.
While many of Toor’s scenes call upon homes, both natal and chosen, The Women (2021) pierced me straight through the heart, tenderly capturing a very specific experience of growing up as a queer-fem child in the gender-segregated spaces of South Asia. In an olive-green room – fitted with a wall-mounted air conditioner and teak-finish furniture – that sings of 1990s nostalgia, three women sprawl on a bed, presumably catching up on family gossip over a cup of tea. To the right, a young adolescent stands before a dressing table, peering down at a few items of makeup lying on the surface. The child’s gaze is both curious and hesitant. I distinctly remember craving to grasp my aunt’s mascara and give it a go, while being absolutely petrified of the social consequences of doing so. The spatial composition of Toor’s painting further reveals the dilemma of gendered spaces. The women and the child occupy the same private bedroom, yet they are separated as if unsure how to inhabit it together. As a nonbinary child (without the language or role models to understand it), I was out of place and uncomfortable in traditional men’s spaces, uninterested in sports talk and codes of machismo. To be among groups of women felt natural, but my presence – especially as I grew older – felt like an anomaly, always unsettled, as if that was the cost of my gender treachery.
Looking at the image from afar, carrying the weight of continents crossed, the group of women represent an entrenched dissonance in ways of relating: unlike how it is in Toor’s painting, the bed is strictly off-limits in the West, an emblem of the deeply guarded interior life of its owner. In the insouciant posture of the three women, their dupattas strewn on the mattress, the artist emphasises their proclivity to lean on each other in times of joy and distress alike. As queer migrants, the stark individualism of the Global North is a feature with which many find it hard to contend. We move to escape certain confines of gender and sexuality, but arrive to find ourselves navigating a strict matrix of intimacy. The absence of social scaffolding threatens to throw us into depression; we fall, fags and dolls, spilling forth, unable to cohere our fragmented parts. A necessary process, writes Anzaldúa: ‘to be healed we must be dismembered, pulled apart’. Each time my chosen family retrieves me curled puddlelike on the hardwood floor, the realisation sinks a little deeper: we deserve to have both, freedom and safety.
Salman Toor: Someone Like You is on view at the Courtauld Gallery, London, 2 October – 10 January
From the October 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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