The Bar on East 13th Street 2019

Curator: This is "The Bar on East 13th Street" by Salman Toor, completed in 2019 using oil paint. What strikes you most when you first look at it? Editor: The overwhelming green palette! It drenches the entire scene, giving it an almost dreamlike, slightly sickly quality. It’s a strangely compelling choice, considering the potentially seedy setting. Curator: Indeed. The monochrome effect certainly pushes us to think about the atmosphere and perhaps the characters within it. Toor's work often explores themes of identity and belonging, particularly within queer and diasporic communities. How might this painting speak to those themes? Editor: The bar setting itself is significant. Bars have historically been vital social spaces, particularly for marginalized groups. Look at how he renders the scene – almost a stage set – filled with people. Are they looking for connection, escape, or simply a sense of community within that green wash? The almost naive brushwork contributes to the reading of this painting as from memory, or as imagined. The bottle details aren't really readable as specific liquors, the painting as a material object has allowed for so many potential scenarios here. Curator: Absolutely. And notice the nuanced ways Toor captures his subjects’ emotions – a sense of yearning or quiet observation. This piece evokes the weight of navigating complex identities in the urban landscape. Think about the title too, “The Bar on East 13th Street”. The specificity of the place grounds it but simultaneously broadens its implications. East 13th Street could be any East 13th Street anywhere really. It's the materiality of this specific, or maybe any, place in time. Editor: There’s a beautiful tension between the specificity of the title and the universality of the emotions. Even the textures—the oil paint creating this tangible sense of layered space– contribute. It is the everyday rendered through the artists' memories, feelings, the production that matters and speaks in paint, not in perfect depictions, a capturing of lived material moments. Curator: I agree entirely. It invites the viewer to participate in those complex dynamics. Editor: This look into materials and production techniques as capturing feeling provides us, as the viewer, the key. Curator: Exactly, it leaves us contemplating the intersections of queer identity, social spaces, and individual experience. Editor: And perhaps, reflects back to us the conditions by which we can see ourselves as reflected through paint.