'Close Quarters', Lahore-based artist Salman Toor's latest show at Karachi's Canvas Gallery, was chatted up (and bought up) by art-lovers, socialites and critics alike. He talks to TFT about his models, his process and the relevance of painting
TFT: Your new show plays upon the most “ordinary” theme in Pakistan, that is servants and their masters. Where did the inspiration come from?
Salman Toor: In a bourgeois society, the working classes are the most visible. If I had to tell a figurative painter where to go to observe people, to sketch them I would tell him to go to the leafy roundabouts of Lahore, or a food street in the old city, or in a little farm off the initial stretches of a motorway or outside the Mashallah houses in Defence. It’s amazing, if an artist has that academic inclination towards the body, what original reposes and compositions can be found that would parallel the sensual aspect of Greco-Roman sculpture. The rich can’t be seen in the same way. They are hard to come by, and when they do, they are self-conscious.
In a bourgeois society, the working classes are the most visible
There is a thrill in having a model in the studio who works in my home or my neighbor’s or friends’ homes. There is also discomfort, an awkwardness, a humor about me harkening back to my 17th century heroes with the aid of someone who is apparently confused, flattered, but ultimately regards me as a silly waif and who is supremely indifferent to the whole moody studio setup, the windows overlooking the gulmohar tree, the wooden palette caked with blobs of ochre and red and olive green paint glistening in the sun, the glass bottles of varnish and linseed.
That’s how I started working on these paintings.
Ramzaan's Room, oil on canvas, 59 x 49 inches
The show was meant to be called Quvaater
TFT: The situations in these works appear at first to be opposite to one another: the masters’ lawns and dance floors are depraved, frolicsome, teeming with revelry, whereas the servants’ quarters are desolate and dingy. That is until one realises that the occupants of the “quarters” are tending to the masters in their glamorous domains. Suddenly the works seem to complement one another! Was this something you deliberately set out to accomplish when making these paintings?
ST: Not at first. The show was meant to be only servants’ rooms as sites of unknown stories. It was meant to be called Quvaater. I did five rooms but then began to do some figures. And that’s where I went. It didn’t occur to me that when the paintings came together this would make another kind of sense because I don’t title the paintings until later so when I was painting the picture, I wasn’t thinking: Ramzaan’s Room. I think in terms of the visuals, not the titles. So when the paintings came together they created a much larger context for themselves. Most artists work in ‘series’ but I don’t really so it’s always a bit tricky to see what the works will look like when they are brought together.
The opening at Karachi's Canvas Gallery
Figurative painting must always prove its superiority to the ravages of instagram
TFT: A renowned landscape painter of Pakistan has said about your style of painting that it hovers in the delicate zone between realism and caricature. Where is this stylisation coming from? Are you laughing at your subjects, laughing with them, or both?
ST: There is no point in painting photorealist images. Why? I wonder. In my imagination figurative painting must always prove its superiority to the ravages of instagram. I like selective realism and try to transform the narrative into a subjective one rather than an objective one. I do let my own opinion distort bodies and space. I enjoy the tyrannical impulse to exercise complete power in an age when art (largely in the West, and consequently here) tries to become a democratic process in which the ‘spectator’ (I’ve never met this spectator person) is encouraged to participate.
Halloween Party, oil on canvas, 44 x 33 inches
Ads are strange and fascinating documents of a clever mix of reality and total fantasy
The stylization is totally my own. I look at a lot of photojournalism and especially advertisements as they employ prime examples of the kind of people they are geared toward. Ads are strange and fascinating documents of a clever mix of reality and total fantasy; they are documents of people’s wishes.
I don’t laugh at other people, I sympathize with the ghost inside their machinery.
I don't laugh at other people, I sympathize with the ghost inside their machinery
TFT: Tell us about Arshad and Ramzaan. Who are they?
ST: Ramzaan is an all-purpose overseer of work around the house (he is an electrician as well). His village is near Mian Channu near Khanewal. Arshad is the gardener, from a village just outside Faislabad. Of course I edited Arshad’s facial features, with the unibrow and skinniness.
TFT: You live between Lahore and New York, and have been doing so for several years. Yet America hasn’t made its way into your work. This is interesting because a lot of expatriate Pakistani artists have creatively mined the apparent duality of their situation to thrilling effect. What explains the absence of such a theme from your work?
ST: Surely there is more to life than a visa and the skylines of Western metropolises.
New York is definitely present in my work. The treasures of the Metropolitan Museum and The Frick and MoMA are haunted by me every Saturday morning. These extensive collections allow me to observe, for hours at my leisure, the most glorious moments of over five hundred dead European geniuses, bought by rich Americans.
I enjoy the relevance of contemporary art. I see its necessity. Most of the time I don’t feel like emulating it. Most contemporary art is geared toward pushing, punching and stretching and generating new forms.
Visitors at the exhibition
TFT: The show was a hit; everything was sold out by the time it opened. Tell us about the reception. What were the best, the wildest, the most interesting reactions?
ST: ‘Vy you are painting naukars?’
‘Vaise I really need a driver these days. Does Ramzaan have a brother?’
The Maid with Sleeping Boy, oil on canvas, 58 x 59 inches
Arshad and Ramzaan, oil on linen, 24.25 x 21.25 inches
TFT: You are being championed by Karachi’s art mafia as our country’s foremost figurative painter. Are you never going to venture into other mediums? Will Salman Toor always be an “old-fashioned” artist?
ST: Not at all. Salman Toor is open-minded and is working on a video at the moment. So much of my inspiration comes from movies and good soundtracks. The old-fashionedness of anything I’ve done is that it has a strong relationship with aesthetic and narrative.
