Tea, 2020

Narrator: Salman Toor draws inspiration from his own life, as well as from art history. Here, he uses still life painting and portraiture to play out an imagined family dinner. Salman Toor.

Salman Toor: It is an encounter and a negotiation—that's what I thought of it at least—between what I imagined was a conservative environment in conversation with an emancipated self.

Often in the paintings there is a very dramatic gesture, and in that instance I try to use the still life to be more expressive than the figures because there's so much communication that needs to happen sometimes between the figures, that I really give up on that idea and I use other things to speak more. The fruit, for me, was the most dramatic bit and I had a great time doing it because the rest of it was pretty straightforward. The fruit is inviting, and voluptuous, and the knife is threatening. I like to use that traditional language of painting to express these ideas.

Green is a completely aesthetic choice for me. I stumbled on it and what I liked about the idea of the color was that it was inviting and poisonous and glamorous. And it had a sense of ambience without being over-emotional.