Motorista Studio: not just a bunch of car dudes
I walked into Motorista Studio expecting "car people". What I found at this Leaside arts club was something else entirely
This essay was co-produced and supported by Ruxandra Stefan, Art Director at Motorista Studio.
I am not a “car person”. When I hear someone blasting through Yorkville in a flashy sports car, I assume the driver is compensating for something. To write this piece, I was ready to plumb my deepest reserves of empathy to find some kind of McLuhan-esque metaphor about “car being an extension of man”. I was a duck out of water.
So when I walked into the studio on a Saturday evening, I was surprised to find…a 90’s Hong Kong-themed live music night. The club’s founder, Rocco, welcomed me warmly. As I followed him through the crowd, I realized that the clinical WhatsApp messages which I had sent to schedule this meeting were misfires. Unplanned introductions flew. Strangers smiled and said hello. A toddler played on the floor, next to a racecar with an open hood.
When we finally sit down, I ask Rocco to describe what he has created. “A community of artists,” he replies. I begin to suspect that Motorista isn’t just a car club.
The next person that I meet is Ross, Rocco’s business partner. A year ago, out and about in the Old Leaside Aerodrome area, Ross began noticing a certain red car parked in front of a building on Commercial Road.
“I popped over to see what was going on,” Ross says. “A bright red 1992 Acura NSX is hard to miss, and nobody would have guessed that it belonged to this little Mexican guy. People make assumptions, right? But I started speaking to him, and I realized he had some big ideas.”
As Ross learned more about Rocco’s vision for an artistic space, he realized that he had found a fellow creative soul. He quit his day job in IT, and joined Rocco as his full-time business partner shortly after.
Rocco is a civil engineer by trade, but he also considers himself an artist. His medium has historically been the restoration and transformation of vintage cars. But his work is always, first and foremost, for the enjoyment of people. In need of founding capital for Motorista, Rocco made the decision to sell his beloved NSX in February of 2024. He fondly refers to the car as his little soldier. “It sacrificed itself to let the doors of Motorista open,” he says. The studio’s most popular Instagram prop is Rocco’s vintage Cadillac. It doesn’t sit behind velvet ropes, and there is no “Do Not Touch” sign. Visitors are invited to open its doors, sit inside it, and touch the steering wheel. Few things are off-limits here, as long as you’re being respectful.
Whether it’s the Acura NSX, the Cadillac, or pieces of material from the old Aerodrome structure, what Rocco has wrought at Motorista is the magic of transformation. At heart, an artist understands that life takes no permanent form, but is always flowing into one thing and out of another.
As the humanist architect Christopher Alexander might observe, the biggest shame of modern building design is that it fails to honour the lives of the people within it. It sacrifices genuine life for a uniform kind of acceptability. Even the most expensive new condo builds or office towers are rife with disappointments. Unoffensive white walls. Non-descript LED track lighting. Unremarkable shades of hardwood. A kitchen with gleaming countertops, arranged in a way that makes actual cooking impossible. 100 identical chrome-plated doorknobs, stamped out in mega-batches by a factory overseas.
Rocco has worked on many such high-rises in his professional life as an engineer, and that makes his transformation of Motorista all the more remarkable. This particular building played the glamorous role of housing administrative offices for the airfield that previously stood here. Rocco tore out the cubicles, opened up the space, and repurposed pieces of siding and flooring into decorative textures for the walls. Nothing is standard, and nothing is sterile.
The stairs and railing of the loft mezzanine are an excellent example. The wood has been left unfinished, but the angles are square, the slats are evenly spaced, and the nails are uniform. Unlike modern design which tries to hide the existence of construction, the aesthetic here reveals that somebody built this for a reason - and built it well.
As I gingerly lean against the banister, I jokingly ask Cristian, the social club manager, if the mezzanine is up to code. He assures me, with a certain gravity, that it absolutely is. “I know it all sounds very sus,” he says. “And yes, we’re all really kids at heart. We want to create a beautiful space for people to be themselves, to create, to do legendary shit - and we want to do it with an adult’s execution.”
Legendary shit spans many categories, and the space has been used for many things. Live jazz. A burlesque night. Modern car commercials. A 1920’s themed photoshoot. There are various textures in the space to suit different aesthetics: clean minimalism, industrial rawness, rich aged wood. The studio is adept at shapeshifting. Its real magic, however, is in hosting productions which are, at heart, love letters to the past.
Jeremy Hopkin, a Toronto history aficionado, drops a tale about the Aerodrome into Motorista’s Instagram feed every Monday. It was the site of Canada’s first airmail delivery on June 24, 1918. In April of 1930, a Toronto Flying Club plane took off and promptly collided into an automobile, on what is now Eglinton Avenue. The flying club’s response was that the car shouldn’t have been parked in the middle of the runway. (Rest assured that the Motorista parking lot is no longer prone to such hazards.)
There is a reverence and a romanticism for history at Motorista, and I am starting to understand why. History is simply the story of other people’s lives. To the folks at Motorista, every car is a story - and it’s often one that is still being written. The club may superficially be about cars, but each one is a living time capsule for the person that built and drove it. Why did it come into your life? How have you changed it? How has it changed you? Each car is a bundle of questions, and the answers provide raw material for the forging of friendships.
English is Rocco’s second language, and this makes his speech clear and uncontrived. I ask him to define Motorista’s values. Zooming in on the fuzzy outlines of an answer, we meander through cars, art, history, and the notion of brotherhood. I ask him to define Motorista’s values by what they are not, and this time his response is swift and simple. “I don’t like anything that puts people on a level,” he says. “When someone asks, what do you do for work, what car do you drive, things like that. Questions that try to place you. We don’t do that here.”
And we all know what he’s talking about: those semi-automatic efforts to size up a stranger at a party, or a new colleague at work. Can I find a reason to reassure myself that I am smarter, richer, hotter, or better than you? Cristian thinks that we occupy ourselves with such status games only when we don’t have anything real to work on. In the absence of a craft that we can pour our soul into, we distract ourselves with endless dick-measuring contests.
There’s a reason that the trope of the starving artist exists, and there’s a reason that the Carters filmed Apeshit at the Louvre. Art has a delightful ability to neutralize and transcend status. It can observe, comment on, modify, and reinvent the many games that human beings play, because it sits outside of them. Art can also just be too busy doing its own thing.
Status games have trouble taking hold at Motorista. It’s less that the members actively prescribe rules, and more that anyone who is looking to play them won’t find many willing participants here. “You can show up with an old Cadillac and people will fawn over it,” says Cristian. “Whereas if you show up with a Lamborghini, people will go ‘meh, ok.’”
I ask Cristian for his thoughts on the fancy cars that people drive through Yorkville. “Maybe they made alot of money, so they could buy a certain car, and they did. But they don’t know anything about it. There’s no depth. Well, maybe there’s depth in other aspects of their life, but not in the car. Once the lease is up, adios.” He contrasts this with someone like Jay Leno: “the guy’s got thousands of cars, and he knows everything about them. He changes oils on a 20 million dollar car.”
If there is one value that seems to win points at Motorista, it is authentic passion. The fact that this sounds woo-woo and cliché is a revelation of our own fears. We feel so ensconced in the expectations and structures of modernity that the idea of living authentically can only be entertained as a joke.
Cristian’s beloved passion project is a BMW M3 E46, into which he has poured countless hours, and a down payment’s worth of cash. Modern BMW design is a bugbear for him, and I ask him where things have gone awry. He thinks that in the process of trying to please a certain market, or following certain trends, the designers at BMW have lost sight of what it was that made their cars beautiful in the first place. They change things that don’t need to be changed, in ways that are incoherent, or serve no actual purpose. (“Take massive grills as an example - often they’re not even necessary for cooling the car. People just want them to be big.”)
From this comment, I realize that even corporations can be insecure artists. By trying to appease the impossibly contradictory preferences of everyone around you, you end up compromising the very things that made you powerful in the first place.
I ask Ross and Cristian, separately, how Motorista makes them feel - and I receive remarkably similar answers. It is a space for creativity and risk-taking, in a way that might be hard to find within a day job, or a past career. Whether it’s the keep-your-head-down culture of a large bank, or the narrow definitions of success enforced by an immigrant family, the world has stockpiles of judgements at the ready. They are eagerly deployed against anyone who is doing something weird, or unconventional, or not quite defined, or uncertain to succeed.
Childish. Risky. Impractical. Unrealistic. Whether it’s choosing to spend a down payment’s worth of cash on a car, or quitting a stable and well-paid job to repurpose an old building, our society has no shortage of indictments for those who go off the beaten path. The harshest of judgements are the ones we levy against ourselves. Perhaps we are being foolish, or irresponsible, or dreaming too big. Are we even any good at this? Should we even try?
Motorista’s magic is in keeping these forces of fear and judgement at bay. “Maybe someone wants to sing, but they don’t feel comfortable doing it in public,” Ross says. “Do you want to come here and practice? Do you want to stand on the stage? We can go next door, and you can just come in here and practice by yourself. But we want you to dip your toes in, and discover that it’s not so bad. In fact, maybe you’ll decide that it’s kind of nice in here.”
I ask Ross what makes this community immune to such judgements. Astutely, he answers my question with a question. “Why do you like writing?”
“I like doing this. I like listening to people tell their stories. Writing is just the process of capturing those things and reflecting them back. Like a photograph.”
“And how many stories are in this room right now?”
“Infinitely many,” I say.
“That’s exactly it,” he says. “You don’t judge people, if you see them as stories that you just don’t understand yet.”
This piece is supported by Motorista: a bookable studio, event space, and creative social club in Leaside, Toronto. Learn more about the community at @motorista.studio. They look forward to sharing their stories, and discovering yours.