Studio Lenca, Artist

London, UK
Photographs and Interview by Sheila Lam

In Jose Campos' studio practice, everything begins with movement. Beyond the movement captured in his vibrant paintings of traditional Salvadoran dancers, as the artist Studio Lenca, or in the films he creates with young activists, lies the movement of a child who once begged for ballet lessons in San Francisco, dancing his way toward visibility for all.

"Ballet allowed me to be seen and also queer," Jose reflects, speaking from a position that understands art not as escape but as a form of radical presence. "Feminine and elegant, it transported me to a fairy land, really. That's when I realized that art was a really powerful thing." This early understanding of art's transformative power emerged from necessity. Born in El Salvador and displaced by civil war, Jose arrived in San Francisco undocumented, working alongside his mother cleaning houses. Ballet became both refuge and revelation, the first indication that art could reshape reality.

That multiplicity of practice, the dancer who became a painter, filmmaker, sculptor, and educator, carries through every aspect of Jose's work today. His paintings pulse with an improvisational energy drawn directly from choreography, each brushstroke a movement responding to color and surface with the immediacy of dance. "I'm not interested in drawing a perfect hand," he explains. "I'm thinking about how I respond in the moment to the surface, to the colors. That's very dance-like. That's improvising."

The twin figures that populate Jose's canvases are traditional dancers from El Salvador, repeated and refracted through bold fields of color. They function as anchors—visual touchstones that create structure in a practice built from fragments. For someone whose beginning was marked by displacement and invisibility, these figures offer something essential: a sense of belonging, a way to keep tempo. They're both deeply personal and profoundly political, rooted in a place Jose carries within him even as his work travels far beyond it.

Yet what distinguishes Jose's practice is not simply representation but the space he creates around it. After a decade teaching in secondary schools, showing up daily to collaborate with students who "might not want to be there because they're dealing with so many things in their lives", he learned to ask fundamental questions: Why is art important? How does what I'm doing contribute to anything? These aren't rhetorical gestures but genuine investigations that shape every project.

Consider his approach to exhibitions: instead of simply presenting work, he wonders how to "spin that" so Salvadoran food is served, so that Salvadoran people feel welcomed, so things "shift slowly and softly." This is what he calls "soft power". Not the aggressive assertion of presence but the careful facilitation of space where others can imagine themselves. It's a practice born from lived experience: for years, being undocumented meant carrying "a huge secret," unable to say in school, "I'm undocumented. Who else is undocumented?" when surely other children beside him shared that reality.

"If these paintings can be seen by a child who's undocumented, and then they think, oh, that's my story—that's it. That's everything," Jose says. This clarity of purpose drives his upcoming exhibition at MoMA PS1, which focuses on education as a form of resistance. There, he'll show paintings made by young people who traveled to the United States "in unofficial ways," documenting journeys that contribute to American culture even as they remain, by definition, undocumented.

The work is always returning to people as subjects to be captured, but as collaborators in the construction of meaning. Whether choreographing with dancers, filming with activists, or teaching students, Jose operates as facilitator, creating conditions for others to shine. It's a practice that emerged from constraint but discovered in those constraints a peculiar freedom: the freedom to be generous, to amplify other voices, to use his growing platform to shift who enters rooms like the one we're sitting in.

"I'm really craving working with people, being in space with people," he says of his future plans, eager to return more deeply to live performance. The statement reveals something essential about his entire practice: that at its core, it's never been about the fixed image on canvas or screen, but about the space between people, the possibility of recognition, the radical act of showing up for one another.

In Jose's hands, art becomes what it was always meant to be: not escape from the world but a way of moving through it differently, with grace and purpose, making visible what others refuse to see.●