COLLECTIONS
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.