Artist and designer Bryan Espiritu puts writing at the centre of his new paintings
In his first gallery show since 2011, Espiritu combines text about trauma with charcoal images
Bryan Espiritu has always considered himself a writer first. And in his new exhibition, Passage — his first gallery show since 2011 — he puts text about personal trauma front and centre.
Espiritu is best known as the mind behind beloved Toronto streetwear brand The Legends League. He's collaborated with brands like NIke. He's worked with Drake. In 2015, he won a Juno for Rap Recording of the Year after executive producing an album by hip-hop collective Naturally Born Strangers. His previous gallery show, Because the Kids Don't Play, was called "one of the most successful art [show] openings in Canadian history" by The Toronto Star. But he says that all that success in art and fashion came out of a love for the written word.
Espiritu had a rough childhood where he faced physical and psychological abuse at home, and isolation and marginalization at school. At one point, he spent his school days "locked in a storage room… for like two weeks."
"I was alone and all I could do was just write and scribble," he says. "And I was fucking 11 years old, right… It wasn't a means for me to necessarily express myself, because I wasn't really sharing much of it. But it was just a means to get that energy out."
In fact, not only was he not sharing it, his unique approach to lettering, which has been part of both his artwork and his clothing, came as a result of him trying to hide what he was writing from people.
"The effort I was putting into it was to disguise the words," he says. "Not in, like, a graffiti handstyle kind of way, but more in a safety way. I was writing coded language so no one could see what I was feeling."
Espiritu remembers a conversation with his father when he was 11 or 12 years old, in which his father dismissed his son's ambition.
"I remember... sitting in the car with my dad, and him saying to me,'What are you going to do with your life?'" he says. "And I said, 'Well, I'm gonna be a writer.' And he said 'You're never going to make it as a writer. You're not going to make no money doing that and you're not going to be very good.' And I was like, 'It doesn't matter if I make a lot of money doing it. If I can live in a hut and have a cup of rice a day, I'll be fine.'"
A few years later, when Espiritu became a father while still in his teens, his dad reminded him of that conversation.
"My dad showed up at the hospital — I'm like 17, and he's like, 'Hey, you remember that talk we had in the car? Well, how do you feel about it now?' And I said, 'I just need two cups of rice now."
He adds that "I Just Need 2 Cups of Rice Now" is the name of one of the paintings in Passage.
The show comes on the heels of him closing Legend's League, which he shuttered at the end of 2022.
"It felt too much like service," he says of the brand. "Like it was stunting my own creative maturity… And also, there was a lot of consideration around whether or not it had run its course. If I didn't dedicate 100 percent time and effort into the brand, I would feel like [Mike] Tyson in his later years, just taking fights to get paid."
The exhibition is a mix of abstract pieces, paintings done from old photos, and word. Unlike in his previous work, the text isn't nearly as coded. He says that in his previous last exhibition, he was disappointed by how little people were reading.
"My last exhibition... all of the work was based on a poem that I had written while waiting for my kid to get off school so I could pick them up," he says. "I was sitting in the playground and I just started writing this poem about the unfortunate reality of children going through adult level trauma… And all of the works [in the show were] based on the poem. And I remember at that show feeling very heartbroken that no one was reading the poem… they were looking at the paintings."
All the pieces in Passage were painted using charcoal powder. Espiritu says that his interest in working with the medium came after he attempted to work with ashes following the death of his father in 2019.
"When we were going to have him cremated, the dude was like 'Does anyone want to initiate the cremation?' I fucking walked up there like I was punching him in the face," he says. I pushed the button, and I just stood there —and the guy had asked me to leave — because to me I felt like I'm getting the last laugh on him. It was a very vengeful thing. I was thinking about that and I didn't feel good about [it]"
In the following years, Espiritu started meditating with incense, then trying to work the ash into his artwork, trying to "reconcile" what happened at his dad's cremation, which led him to working with the ash-like charcoal powder. It was a medium he didn't immediately know what to do with.
"I don't personally know anyone who paints with charcoal," he says."I was doing some experimentation, and my assistant, Amy — I don't know why she did it — but she she ended up mixing some of it in with, like a acrylics that we or like gesso or something that we had sitting around. And that night, I ended up painting the diptych that's in the show. You can see it's literally my hands, me just going crazy."
Ultimately, Espiritu hopes that Passage can be an exhibit for people who feel like he felt as a child and a younger adult.
The feeling of not being heard, of not being spoken for and listened to," he says. "Not everyone has access to strong friendships. Not everyone has access to therapy. Or even to a voice and the ability to to speak their mind. So I hope that there's at least one person that comes in and reads something that says like, 'Oh shit, I don't know if he meant to do this, but he's speaking to something that I feel inside.'"
Passage by Bryan Espiritu runs at the Cultural Goods Gallery in Toronto (1444 Dupont St., Unit 15) from Oct. 27-Dec. 21.
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