Barbie Bakri

I look at lots of 17th and 18th century European painters. The floridness and vividness of their styles appeals to me. The overcrowded Baroque compositions of Rubens, the dignity of the subjects in Van Dyck, the lushness of romance and sensuality in Watteau, the decorative brilliance of Veronese. It is a pre-industrial way of looking, a foreign language of picture making. I internalized that way of looking and working, sometimes through mimesis and other times through experiment and invention.
—Salman Toor