Safety and comfort – two feelings central to Salman Toor’s figurative paintings, and the sensations we face in our interactions with them. His sumptuous artworks illustrate vulnerable, private yet mundane moments in fictional young, brown, queer men’s lives, gently seesawing between seductive and poignant, inviting and eerie. With the aim of representing identities often missing from the canon of art history, Salman portrays the presence of queer brown men in ordinary, public and private spaces, unravelling their profoundly relatable existence to ultimately create a loving community. Many of his paintings are dominated by the colour green and its jewel-like yet potentially poisonous hue – such as The Dressing Table, which graces the cover of Extra Extra no. 20 – playing with the dichotomy between heartening and harrowing.