Bar Boy, 2019

Salman Toor: The green bar paintings are like fantasies about, and also based on autobiography of my life living in the East Village.

I like using devices that light up dramatically and the phone does that for me. The idea of the portrait is so linked now to our gadgets, to our smartphones, we're constantly taking portraits of ourselves. But most importantly, I think, is the idea of the light.

Narrator: Toor emphasizes the fantastical quality of the scene by giving his characters gangly limbs and sloping posture. He describes these figures as marionettes.

Salman Toor: I really liked the idea of a marionette, the idea of a fairy tale-like language in which the nose and the hands are kind of cobbled together. It's the language of fairy tales, maybe Pinocchio, sort of characters that have complexity, but they're also a little bit wooden because they are made up of real lives, a lived life, and also tropes about ethnicity and community or place of origin. And the protagonist in the paintings kind of moves between being very free and empowered and also passive and maybe a little bit humiliated. And the marionette figure encapsulates those things for me.