Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: December 09, 2020 | 
Ghost Story by Salman Toor
(Disclaimer: This article was originally published on Youlin on 14th April, 2019)
The room is painted green, and three white candles throw lopsided shadows against the walls. A long nosed figure, face illuminated by the light of the flame, is in the midst of regaling his audience with an anecdote, features ablaze with a haunted fervour and arm thrown around the man next to him, whose eyes have the faraway look of a reverie. Another such character sits on the floor, enthralled. A muddle of lines and strokes form the floorboards, while three friends stand nearby in front of a faint green painting, an intimate little gathering grouped around the illuminated screen of a cell phone. This is a world of musings and dreams, a forlorn, distant memory, beckoned into reality by the artist. Ghost Story is the first painting that greets the viewer at Salman Toor's show ‘New Paintings’ at the O Art Space, Lahore.
Toor's paintings have the air of flamboyant fantasies, where eccentric characters are caught between whimsy and nostalgia, loneliness and ecstasy. In Palm Reader III, two off-kilter characters, one perched on a sofa with his hand held out and the other at his feet holding his palm with both hands, share an intimate sliver of time, swapping notions of spirituality and superstition. A lamp spews out white light in playful white dabs of paint, while the men gaze at each other in adoration, a gentle secret caught between them. The painting is simple, quiet, and hypnotic. A lizard rests on the wall nearby next to the window, its limbs splayed comically. The shadows beneath the sofa pool on the floor like dark puddles. It is a simple tale as old as time, secrets and fears coming out in the dead of night, curiosity giving way to familiarity, and perhaps blossoming into love. What is remarkable is that these pictures are all pulled out of the artist's mind, a passionate cluster of memory and imagination, oddball characters and personalities merging into one another within stories practiced and perfected over time.
These quaint tales are all explorations of intimacy, of friendships and relationships, and of the infinite nature of bonds forged despite the fragile nature of mortality and circumstance. In Toor's world, characters of different ethnicities dance the night away in small rooms, holding one another close, with wine glasses scattered in the dark, or two men perched on a brick wall, sing together below a sky full of curling, wispy clouds, a smattering of pink roses beneath them. There is an enchantment to the ordinariness of these occurrences, an overwhelming rhapsody that leaves its viewer transfixed. Props such as smart phones, laptops and beer bottles root these characters in a modern world, and yet the yearning and isolation is evident, born of being afloat between multiple cultures, languages, and beliefs.
If Toor's tales are fictitious, they are about the relentless reality of the human experience, the truth of them finding its way into your nerve endings. In times of darkness, these are raw, unalloyed characters and narratives that live and glow: unabashed, delightful, and tremulously tender. They bring to mind words from T. S. Eliot’s Preludes:
“I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.”
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