At London’s Courtauld Gallery, the exhibition ‘Salman Toor: Someone Like You’ brings together 19 paintings made by Salman Toor since 2019, alongside a separate display of drawings.

This is the first major European solo exhibition by Toor, who now lives and works in New York. The exhibition’s curator, Elena Crippa, says Toor’s paintings are akin to “short stories, if not portraits.” We encounter people partway through an evening, without knowing everything that brought them there.

The central dancer in Salman Toor’s Ghost Ball (2023) wears a traditional Pakistani khussa on one foot while the other foot is bare. His mismatched feet suggest the difficulty of inhabiting several cultural realities and the pleasure of moving between them without explanation. Around him, bodies whirl through an emerald atmosphere, accompanied by musicians, embracing couples and a voguing figure. The dancers share a space without sharing an emotional state. Exuberance sits beside solitude and pleasure itself seems to require effort.

In The Bar on East 13th (2019), a bartender with plaits, ribbons and painted nails faces the onlooker across a counter. A cut citrus fruit, knife and shallow glass occupy........

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