Salman Toor, the New York-based Pakistani artist, has been able to invent a place that brings together the part of the culture he wants to reflect from both locations, traveling to it requires nothing more than looking at his work. "A violent change of scenery is good for painting. When I travel back, it's as if my mind, my sense of time and my personal space are in New York while my body is already in Lahore. Everything is fresh. Briefly, for a week, I can see my own home culture as an alien would. The same thing happens when I return to New York. These borders of the world, with their profound differences between cultures and clans, become real," the artist told to Juxtapoz magazine.

"A violent change of scenery is good for painting..."

His work leaves no one indifferent, and the painter has the art of telling stories through his paintings, usually about dark, elongated, queer boys or men -inspired by the peasants of the painter David Teniers-, who are well-educated and creative and begin to live in New York as artists, experiencing constant changes in their ideas about immigration and foreigners, and even about what it really means to be an American. Salman Toor's works also pick up fantasies about the artist himself and his community. "I use figurative images to mythologize my life, to define my relationship to power, but also to laugh at myself and have fun." comments the artist.

His work leaves no one indifferent, and the painter has the art of telling stories through his paintings, usually about dark, elongated, queer boys or men -inspired by the peasants of the painter David Teniers

The electronic devices are very recurrent in his work, it might be shocking to see them in scenes in which our mind tends to obviate them, but for Salman it is a tool to blur between the public and the private "I am moved by the cell phone as a source of intimate light. It's the light in which people read, look - together or alone - with that restful face. In these moments they have the intimacy of one of Vermeer's letter readers."

"...In these moments they have the intimacy of one of Vermeer's letter readers."

It is difficult to think about the artist and not automatically relate him to that green color that is so present in his work, to try to find out what is hidden behind it, but precisely the key for the author is there, that green is not a sentimental color, and that is what he likes: its attractiveness, charm and at the same time that connotation of potion and poison.

"I use figurative images to mythologize my life, to define my relationship to power, but also to laugh at myself and have fun."