Salman Toor’s solo show, The Happy Servant, showing currently at Aicon, New York, advances his rapidly evolving signature a step further. Essentially a figurative artist he critiques the status quo through provocative characterisations of his protagonists. Peppered with sardonic humour his aesthetic vocabulary is a lively mix of elements from his affluent Pakistani background and its surrounding populist culture, and his Western art education, close study of the classical masters, the 19th century genre painting and portraiture.
The exhibition features a group of 11 paintings that reflect the feudal mindset of the uber rich pseudo urban masters and the lowbrow domestic help who serve them. Paintings such as ‘The happy servant’, ‘The happy sweeper’ and ‘Girl and boy with driver’ are true to life cameos of underprivileged, uneducated, lowly servants attending/serving gentrified youth from the elite strata of society and they highlight the existing and very apparent class and cultural divide that separates the haves and have-nots.
Other than the use of literal, relatable imagery in these paintings the artist also resorts to fantasy arrangements to accent the deprivation of the humble working class. His painting, ‘Rickshaw drivers’ dream’, (which borrows its composition from Titian's ‘Three ages of man’) bridges the divide through a Bollywood style dream sequence where “class differences that typically dominate South Asian society are instantaneously dissolved and cooks, gardeners, landlords and drivers all rejoice in choreographed triumph for a singular imaginary couple.”
If arrogance, frivolity and indulgence mark his portrayal of the upper-crust then his ‘Believer with tasbih, with cap and with moustache’ series of paintings hint at extremist tendencies that in the garb of faith bolster the morale of the poverty stricken.
Stage-setting his compositions like cinematic stills Toor opts for dramatic narratives that source Renaissance and Baroque paintings, local commercial mass media imagery like Lahore cinema billboards and contemporary advertising from Bollywood and fashion magazines to acquire an emotional pitch that simmers with suggestive potential. The risqué and the naughty collide with religio-social anomalies deep-seated cultural inconsistencies and whimsical high society aspirations. Often the type-cast figures in his paintings are “culled from the ubiquitous advertisements for jewellery, beauty products (fairness creams), new shopping malls and mobile phone providers dominating Pakistan's urban media landscape.
Other than his engaging narratives Toor’s considerable painterly grasp offsets his oeuvre to positive advantage. Influence of representational artist John Currin is evident in this young artists technical paint application, drawing stylisations and the candour with which he conceptualises his subjects. In Currin’s work one sees inspiration that ranges from Fragonard and Boucher to Norman Rockwell but he thrives as the bad boy of American painting because his work can be quite kitschy and perverse also. If the artist’s satiric stance follows Currin’s bent then the potential inherent in his personal style will be stunted.
His painting ‘The driver and the maid’ is a forceful manifestation of the artist’s individual approach where he mixes fantasy and reality to address a valid issue without recourse to the bizarre and the grotesque. Hopefully more of the same will follow.
Toor was born in 1983 in Lahore, Pakistan. He received his BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2006 and his MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2009 and is currently based in Brooklyn.