"Salman Toor's Men in the City" by Sean Burns

Step into one of Salman Toor’s emerald rooms – waltz or slump, even. ‘Was that a martini you ordered?’ the hipster barman seems to ask in The Bar on East 13th (2019), cupping half a lemon above an elegant cocktail glass in a scene not accidentally redolent of Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), which is on view in the preceding room to Toor’s solo show, ‘Someone Like You’, at the Courtauld Gallery, London.

Beside the server, a tumbler has toppled over next to two men so entwined in embrace that their faces almost become united, as one works his kisses up the chin of the other, his hands wrapped around his shoulders and cradling his head. There is movement everywhere in this stationary image: its cast of characters are compositional elements in a painting so eloquent in its articulations of atmosphere that you can almost smell the bartender’s cologne over the spilt alcohol.

Toor’s distinct jabs of oil paint, which capture the light across bottles and faces, amount to something you might trace back to Vincent van Gogh or Pierre Bonnard, though they are entirely his own. These post-impressionist flecks of energy give his works a romantic feeling of the past, upset only by contemporary signifiers: loose phone chargers (Man with Face Creams and Phone Plug, 2019), laptops (Pillow Fight, 2022) – oh, and open displays of queer affection (Park Kissers, 2022). The haze of absinthe green renders all beneath it in a psychological mist that could take you to Paris in the 1880s: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (also in the Courtauld Gallery collection) might stagger in at any moment.

Read full article at frieze.com.