Salman Toor endows green with an otherworldly charge, hovering at the fault line of sensuality and dread. Once a moral index, color is here reclaimed as subversion’s vehicle. His signature beryl haze — narcotic and inquisitive — functions as cognitive camouflage: it conjures murkiness, cloaking his figures in a wistful, sensuous dimness.

Born in Lahore and based in Brooklyn, Toor staged his most expansive exhibition to date, following his breakout show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020. Wish Maker, which closed in July, spanned both of Luhring Augustine’s New York venues: small to medium-scale paintings unfurled in Chelsea, while works on paper — presented for the first time in a focused format — were shown in Tribeca. Padparadscha and ferric ochres seep in. Brushwork slackens; compositions tilt off-kilter, marred by half-erasures and signs of periodic disassembly. Fixity is anathema — nothing ossifies. Toor courts mutability and rebuffs assimilation.

“How can I accept a limited, definable self,” Anaïs Nin once wrote, “when I feel, in me, all possibilities?”

Toor’s practice answers in kind. Negotiating South Asian painterly traditions and a Western modernism in recoil, his references evade containment. Mughal miniatures, Indian court pomp, Caravaggist tenebrism, Schiele’s erotic strain — they orbit, but never settle. This is no globalist pastiche. Rather, Toor bristles at legibility and balks at transactional acculturation. He shrugs off emissary expectation, laying bare the toll of visibility — and the risk of being flattened into export or maxim.