SERIES

IN BETWEEN
HURT & HEALING





My work emerges from the belief that images can hold frequency — that they can transmit the quiet shifts of consciousness occurring within us and the world around us. I am drawn to moments where beauty appears unexpectedly: a gesture, a fragment, a landscape, a fleeting emotion. These moments become invitations, asking to be held, examined, and transformed through my hands. Across painting, Polaroid emulsion lifts, mixed media, and short-form digital works like, my practice traces the subtle movements between hurt and healing, rupture and repair.


At the core of my work is the instinct to move first from intuition — to follow what feels alive, let it shape me, and then offer the clarity that comes from that process. I often think of the Water Bearer: a figure who doesn’t preach, but pours. My art follows that gesture. Each piece becomes a vessel carrying insight, emotional truth, and the energetic residue of transformation. Through the analogue tactility of Polaroid skins, the layered surfaces of paint, or the contemporary language of social video, I treat imagery as a form of transmission — a way of raising consciousness through softness rather than force.

In Between Hurt & Healing sits at the heart of my practice. It explores how growth happens in liminal spaces: not in moments of perfection, but in the messy, tender intervals where we are still learning to hold ourselves. Works like the Sexual Healing and Sanctuary series map this process through color, texture, and repetition, using the materiality of Polaroid film as a metaphor for vulnerability and transformation. As the emulsion stretches, tears, settles, or resists, it mirrors the emotional landscapes I’m exploring.

With Source Message, I extend this inquiry into the present tense of digital culture. Using short-form video — a medium native to our time — I collect moments of lived beauty and overlay them with language that has shaped my own healing. The piece becomes both archive and altar: a record of the consciousness I’ve been cultivating, and a reflection of how meaning travels through contemporary channels. It acknowledges that spiritual evolution now coexists with algorithms, that transformation can appear in a fleeting clip as much as in a sacred text.

Ultimately, my purpose is simple: to create work that opens something. A pause. A breath. A subtle shift in awareness. In an era defined by rapid change, I aim to make art that offers the viewer a moment of clarity — an invitation to soften, to witness themselves, and to remember what is possible when we allow beauty, curiosity, and consciousness to guide us.







SERIES

SANCTUARY
SEXUAL HEALING
SOURCE MESSAGE
FATHER FIGURE















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.

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Each piece begins as a Polaroid emulsion lift, expanded through paint and colour. The process becomes a meditation—peeling, lifting, and layering to reveal what lies beneath. The first image, photographed in Toronto’s Earlscourt Park, marks the moment I first became conscious of nature’s quiet teachings, realizing that if the trees could die, survive winter, and bloom again in spring, then so could I. The photographs that follow, taken throughout Amsterdam’s Park Frankendael, continue this rhythm of renewal. It is there, among the trees and shifting light, that I found my own kind of church: a sanctuary without walls, where the sacred feels near and the act of seeing becomes prayer.

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.





Higher Conciousness (Winter), 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm
Mothers Watch (Winter), 2025, 20x20
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm
Winter’s Bone (Winter), 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm
Restructuring (Spring), 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm
Dust In The Wind (Spring), 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 35 x 27 cm
Opulence (Spring), 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 35 x 27 cm
Ascension (Spring), 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 35 x 27 cm
Flounce (Summer), 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm
Golden Girl (Summer), 2025
Polarid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 15 x 21 cm
Paved With Gold (Autumn), 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 27 x 35 cm





















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.



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Using Polaroid emulsions lifted onto canvas, I reconstruct fragmented images of male figures and crystalline forms in varying states of vulnerability and ecstasy. Each layer of the photograph is peeled, lifted, and assembled, echoing the slow, imperfect process of emotional and spiritual healing. In this repetition, the act of making becomes both confessional and subversive—a reclaiming of the erotic as sacred. The natural wrinkles, cracks, and air bubbles that emerge become part of the language of repair, flaws that hold truth. Through this process, anonymity becomes a catalyst for liberation, allowing fragments of the self to exist without expectation or shame.

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.








Original Sin, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm
Erasure, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm
Human Condition, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm
Cruising, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm
Exposure, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm
Reclamation, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20 cm
Master Healer, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 7 panels, each 20 x 20 cm
Get Me Bodied, 2025
Polaroid emulsion lift and acrylic on canvas, 50 x 50 cm

Source Message is composed of 26 short-form TikTok videos made from fragmented moments gathered from travel, everyday life, and the quiet instants when beauty makes itself known. Each clip carries overlaid text in the familiar TikTok font, grounding the work in the visual language of our time while honoring the raw immediacy with which we now record our becoming.



The words are drawn from my healing and transformation process: phrases, insights, and truths that surfaced in the space In Between Hurt & Healing. When placed over moving images, they act like transmissions—fleeting yet potent reminders of the inner shifts that shape a life.

Sound becomes an essential layer. Each video is paired with an intentionally chosen song that amplifies the emotional tone of the scene and deepens the meaning of the words on screen. The music holds the atmosphere: the quiet of a morning, the rush of a city, the softness of a memory, the ache or expansion of a moment. Together, these sonic choices transform the piece into an energetic landscape—one where image, text, and sound move as a single message.

As a whole, Source Message reclaims the rhythm of the feed as a space for reflection. It acknowledges the mediums through which we now narrate our lives, while demonstrating that even the most ephemeral frames can carry depth. The work asks how healing can show up in real time, inside the tools and aesthetics of the present day, and how meaning is often found not in a single moment — but in the accumulation of many small ones.


Photo by Harriet Browse

Ryan Esquivel is a Filipino-Canadian artist and designer based in Amsterdam whose work spans analogue image-making, painting, collage, and digital media. 

Through processes that include Polaroid emulsion lifts—peeled, stretched, and layered skins of imagery—he examines identity, transformation, and the imperfect beauty of becoming. The material shifts within each piece echo the slow, intuitive nature of emotional repair.

Esquivel’s practice extends into the digital realm with Source Message, a series of short-form video works that translate moments of lived beauty into a contemporary visual language. This expansion bridges the tactile and the technological, reflecting his belief that analogue presence and digital immediacy can coexist as meaningful modes of expression.

Through series such as Sexual Healing, Sanctuary, and his growing digital work, Esquivel continues to explore themes of queerness, spirituality, and self-reclamation—creating work that honours the human mark, the emotional trace, and the evolving ways we construct and witness images today.











hello@ryanesquivel.art
+31 6 353 19881