Studio Lenca is proud to present In The Light That Remains, the artist’s curatorial debut, on view June 5 to July 16, 2025, at Kates-Ferri Projects in New York City with an opening reception Friday, June 6th 6 - 8pm at 563 Grand St. NYC 10002.

This group exhibition brings together Salvadoran artists from both El Salvador and the diaspora, voices that illuminate the complexities of identity, memory, and survival in the face of displacement and erasure.

About Studio Lenca

Studio Lenca is the artistic practice of Jose Campos a Salvadoran-born, UK-based visual artist. His work explores themes of identity, migration, and cultural memory through visual and performative storytelling. In the light that remains marks his first curatorial project.

Opening Reception Program on Friday, June 6, 2025, 6 PM - 8 PM

Guests will enjoy complimentary pupusas by Pupusas City, alongside a celebratory toast and cocktails provided by Buchanan’s Whisky.

We extend our sincere thanks to Buchanan’s Whisky for their generous support in making the opening reception of the exhibition possible. From the thoughtfully curated food by Pupusas City to cocktails to toast to our incredible artists, Buchanan’s sets the tone for an evening that reflects the spirit and mission of this exhibition and celebrates the vibrant spirit of Hispanic Americans.

100 limited edition posters In The Light That Remains designed by Studio Lenca will be available for sale ($25 each): All proceeds will directly support Glasswing International in providing free creative arts education in El Salvador

Location: Kates-Ferri Projects | 563 Grand St, New York, NY 10002 Gallery Hours: Thursday – Saturday, 12noon - 6 PM or by appointment Admission: Free

In the Light that Remains

El Salvador is a place of layers. Like sediment building over centuries within its volcanic landscape-cultural, political, and material-it is a place shaped by cycles of resistance, rupture, and renewal. Fault lines of colonial violence, civil war, U.S. intervention, and migration continue to indent themselves into the present.

In the Light that Remains, curated by Studio Lenca at Kates Ferri Projects gathers contemporary Salvadoran artists who excavate and expose these layers-mixing and remaking. Material refracts through time and context, bending around absence and re-emerging with new shape.

Studio Lenca (José Campos) curates with deep personal and political intent. Known for work that explores diaspora and identity, here he assembles a community of artists whose practices challenge flattened

narratives of what we’re told Salvadoran art or Salvadoran identity ‘should’ look like.

Marta Torres’ installation Existiendo Excesivamente (Existing Excessively): a riot of inflated yellow bags and printed tentacles. It bursts into the gallery like a mythic creature, impossible to ignore. It defies the minimalist, Kardashian-coded aesthetic we’ve all subconsciously absorbed. It insists on being seen, heard, felt- too much, excesivamente, in all the right ways.

That too-muchness is everywhere in the show-piercing through the dark. Maximalism becomes a method: clashing surfaces, glitter, PVC, pigment, upcycled textures, domestic remnants. These are survival tools. Each work disperses meaning like a prism- splitting singular histories into a spectrum of voices, colours, and forms.

John Rivas’ sculptural paintings feel like emotional archives. Upholstery, vinyl, family photos, plastic: surfaces that hold conversations and personal histories. His drawings, painted surfaces and materials are porous-leaky, sentimental, and alive. They refuse to be neatly framed or pinned down.

Simon Vega scavenges beach detritus-trash left behind by tourism and geopolitics-rebuilding it into speculative sci-fi machines. He transforms the broken and discarded into psychedelic futurism.

Herbert De Paz paints corn as cosmology. Not as symbol, but as life source, family lineage, and resistance. His canvases pulse with ancestral energy, rooted in knowledge systems colonialism tried to erase.

Material, throughout the show, isn’t passive. It’s active, unstable, often absurd. In works by Elmi Mata, Edwin Soriano, Lissania Vatra, and Antonio Romero, images are not fixed-they’re membranes. Permeable surfaces through which stories seep, blur, and multiply.

Photographer José Cabezas documents historiantes-ceremonial performers-in full regalia. These are not costumes. They are living archives, carrying the tinnitus of conquest and resistance.

When asked about the show, Studio Lenca shared his childhood memories of making recuerdos-handmade centrepieces for family celebrations, from a treasured box of glitter, ornaments, glue and ribbons. That approach runs through the exhibition and his curation. Making as healing. Making as remembering. Making as reclaiming space.

In the Light that Remains is a porous, excessive, layered gathering. Between a bodega and a valet cleaners on Grand Street in New York’s Lower East Side, a portal opens, not to escape history, but to sit with it, reshape it, and keep making. From what’s left, from what’s buried, from what still glimmers- we begin again, luminously.

-Text by Oliver Herbert.

Oliver Herbert is a researcher and curator based in London, UK. @_oliver_herbert

Artists

The exhibition includes internationally recognized figures such as Simón Vega, who presented a solo exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in 2024, alongside artists Elmi Mata, John Rivas, Antonio Romero, José Cabezas, Lissania Vatra, Marta Torres, Edwin Soriano, and Herbert de Paz – each contributing work shaped by personal history, geography, and artistic language. Collectively, their practices speak to queerness, migration, memory, trauma, and reimagining. Their work resists singular narratives, instead forming a constellation, a chorus, and a shared light.

Jose Cabezas is a Salvadoran American photographer based in San Salvador, El Salvador. Since 2014, he has worked as a contract photographer for Thomson Reuters. Previously, he was a photographer for Agence France-Presse (2007-2014) and La Prensa Gráfica (2002- 2007). Cabezas has completed assignments across Latin America, North America, and Asia. His long-term project History Dancers explores Los Historiantes, one of El Salvador's most culturally significant traditional dances.

Herbert De Paz (b. 1991) is an artist from Santa Tecla, El Salvador, currently based in Brazil. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Visual Arts from UERJ (2018) and studied at Parque Lage through the “Fundamentação” program (2013-2014). De Paz’s paintings and collages utilize archival imagery to challenge dominant narratives of colonial history in the Americas.

Elmi Mata was born in 1993 in the department of Morazán, El Salvador, and emigrated to the United States in 2001. In 2018, Mata received an MA in Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art. Their practice explores history, abstraction, and painting as a process. Mata’s work is rooted in themes of spirituality and healing, especially in relation to the trauma experienced while crossing the southern border as a child. Through painting, they aim to reflect and synthesize the resilience of the Salvadoran community in the United States.

John Rivas (b. 1997, Newark, NJ) is a first-generation American artist whose practice is deeply rooted in his ancestral stories. Through sculptural painting, Rivas explores the socioeconomic, racial, and cultural dimensions of immigrant life, the preservation of family narratives, and his own Latinx identity. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and his MFA from Columbia University. His work has been exhibited nationally and is part of the collection at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).

Antonio Romero (b. 1978, San Salvador, El Salvador) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores anonymity, memory, and collective imagination. Romero holds a degree in Fine Arts with a focus on painting from the University of El Salvador. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museo de Antropología and Museo de Arte de El Salvador (MARTE), the Centro Cultural de España and Centro Cultural de México (San Salvador), Fundación Rozas Botrán (Guatemala City), and The Americas Collection (Coral Gables, FL). His work is also included in major collections such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Mario Cader-Frech Collection, and the Poma Family Collection (Miami).

Edwin Soriano is a sculptor and art educator based in New York, originally from El Salvador. His work explores scientific and spiritual concepts, particularly the human inclination toward magnetic or energetic centers, drawing parallels with prehistoric spiritual practices. Soriano primarily works with stone, bronze, and wood. He studied sculpture at the

National Arts Center (CENAR) in El Salvador and has exhibited in over 50 group shows and 10 solo exhibitions in Spain, Japan, Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and the United States. His works are included in private collections internationally.

Marta Torres is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in El Salvador and currently based in Berlin. Her practice combines art, spatial design, vernacular traditions, fashion, and new media to provoke conversations about urgent social issues in El Salvador.

Lissania Vatra is a multidisciplinary artist and performance practitioner engaged in ongoing artistic exploration. Her work adopts disruptive symbols and aesthetics to provoke questioning, weaving together elements of philosophy, law, error, poetic language, and dramaturgy. Her performances investigate the contested terrain of bodily autonomy and subjectivity, often addressing themes of life, death, meaninglessness, and the absurd. Key performances include La Fábrica, Santa Abortera, and Ensayo para una muerte elegida. Her object and installation works include Tejido Conectivo, Instrucciones para alzar el vuelo, and Calendario Lunar, which was presented at the Equinox Latin American Gallery Fair in the curatorial projects section. She also co-created the installation ¿Quién me abraza? with artist Ayumu, exhibited at “Invernadero” at the Centro Cultural de España.

Simon Vega (b. 1972, El Salvador) studied Fine Arts at the University of Veracruz in Mexico and earned a Master’s in Contemporary Art from the Complutense University of Madrid. He has exhibited widely across Europe, the United States, and Latin America, with exhibitions at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), the IX Havana Biennial (2006), El Museo del Barrio in New York (2011), and Hilger Brot Kunsthalle in Vienna (2010-2017). In 2016, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC) in Costa Rica hosted his first solo museum exhibition. His work is included in prominent collections such as PAMM, MADC, the Sanziany Collection in Vienna, and El Museo del Barrio. Vega lives and works in La Libertad, El Salvador.

Studio Lenca is the artistic practice of José Campos, a Salvadoran-born artist currently based in the UK. His work navigates identity, migration, and diasporic experience through a multidisciplinary approach that includes painting, performance, video, and social practice. Drawing from his lived experience as an undocumented child who migrated to the United States during El Salvador’s civil war, Studio Lenca’s work engages with

themes of visibility, resilience, and cultural memory. His vibrant portraits and community-based highlight untold stories of marginalized communities. Studio Lenca has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions including Leave to Remain at Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate, and Rutas at Kates-Ferri Projects in New York (2024) and Chisme at the Parrish Art Museum in New York. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions such as the 2024 Triennial at El Museo del Barrio in New York. His work is held in prominent public and private collections, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the Parrish Art Museum, the Rubell Museum and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.

Available Art Work from Exhibition 

Exhibition Catalogue

Video of exhibition on YouTube