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)