COLLECTIONS
My practice is a meditation on identity and transformation, expressed through handmade images built from Polaroid film, paint, and touch. I work in the space between hurt and healing, where what is torn, imperfect, or in repair becomes a site of restoration.
I believe art must retain a sense of humanity, felt through trace, texture, and presence. The marks we leave behind are proof that we were here.
COLLECTIONS
SANCTUARY
SEXUAL HEALING
Sanctuary is an exploration of transformation through the language of nature. Inspired by a personal essay of the same name, the series expands on a question my father often asks me—“Do you go to church?”—reimagining what it means to seek the sacred, not through institutions, but through presence. These works follow a journey in which faith is not framed as belief, but as attention, connection, and the quiet act of noticing what is already alive around us.
LIMITED EDITION PRINTS COMING SOON
CONTACT FOR PRIVATE COMMISIONS
The early works are washed in deep indigo and violet, echoing the stillness of winter and the liminal space between endings and beginnings. As the series unfolds, soft pinks and luminous yellows appear, hinting at warmth returning and the quiet pulse of renewal. By summer, the palette shifts into contrast rather than brightness: dense shadows and near-blacks hold the composition, while marigold flowers and faint lavender highlights flare against the darkness. Autumn returns to grounding greens and browns, closing the cycle in quiet continuity. Across these transitions, colour moves like breath—shifting, expanding, and revealing the unseen rhythms of transformation.
Nature, in this work, is not background but teacher. Its cycles mirror the act of becoming, of dying and being reborn again and again. The peeled emulsions, with their cracks and textures, reveal the beauty in imperfection and the holiness in repair. Sanctuary marks the spiritual beginning of this exploration—a turning inward toward presence, faith, and renewal. Its quiet revelations later find embodiment in Sexual Healing, where the same inquiry moves through the body. Together, they form a meditation on becoming whole, through nature, through flesh, through light.
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 30x30
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20x20
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20x20
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 30x30
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 35x27
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 35x27
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 35x27
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20x20
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 27x35
Sexual Healing explores intimacy, shame, and liberation through the queer male body. Drawing from religious iconography, classical sculpture, and natural formations of stone, the series reimagines the body as both subject and vessel, a site of trauma, desire, and transcendence.
LIMITED EDITION PRINTS COMING SOON
CONTACT FOR PRIVATE COMMISIONS
The figures, often sculpted in stone or cast in bronze, embody both strength and stillness, echoes of the torsos that drift through digital seas of desire, line the walls of bathhouses, and endure pain in pursuit of connection. These fragmented bodies speak to the tension between intimacy and anonymity, pleasure and endurance, the sacred and the profane. Their stoicism becomes symbolic of survival, while the fragility of the Polaroid surface reveals what lies beneath the façade of control.
The phallus, a recurring motif throughout the series, serves not as a symbol of dominance but of vulnerability, reclamation, and becoming. Through these crystalline and corporeal forms, Sexual Healing reframes pleasure as an act of transformation, where the physical and spiritual converge.
Colour plays an intentional role throughout the series. Each hue is chosen through the lens of colour psychology and the energetic language of the chakras: red for desire and disconnection, yellow for attention and insecurity, violet for spiritual awakening. These colours do not merely decorate the image; they vibrate with emotion, guiding the viewer through states of tension, release, and restoration.
As a queer Filipino Canadian artist, I confront inherited shame surrounding sexuality and the body, shame rooted in colonialism, religion, and the Western gaze. The repetitious nature of the work becomes both devotional and defiant, a meditation on forgiveness, reclamation, and self-acceptance.
Between photography and painting, body and spirit, stone and skin, Sexual Healing reflects the quiet power of becoming whole, an ongoing dialogue between vulnerability and resilience, and the beauty that lives in between.
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20x20
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20x20
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 30x30
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 30x30
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20x20
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20x20
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 7 panels, each 20x20
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 50x50
Ryan Esquivel is a Filipino-Canadian artist and designer based in Amsterdam. Through analogue processes that merge photography, painting, and collage, he explores identity, transformation, and the imperfect beauty of becoming.
His practice centres around Polaroid emulsion lifts—images peeled, layered, and expanded through paint—a tactile act of reconstruction where emotion and material converge. Each wrinkle, tear, and imperfection forms part of a visual language of repair, echoing the slow, intuitive nature of healing.Through series such as Sexual Healing and Sanctuary, Esquivel examines the intersections of queerness, spirituality, and self-reclamation. Rooted in the belief that art must retain a sense of humanity in an age shaped by AI, his work insists on the presence of the hand, the body, and the emotional trace—whether in subject matter or construction. His wider practice moves through the space between hurt and healing, guided by creativity, beauty, and intention.
Grounded in intimacy and material experimentation, Esquivel’s intention is to scale these collections into larger works and to continue developing new bodies of work that deepen his inquiry into identity, transformation, and wholeness—while inspiring others to protect the human mark in art, to value touch, trace, and lived experience, and to choose presence over perfection.