As I said in the previous post, understanding of Studio Lenca's art should start with knowing more about his stage name - Studio Lenca. Of course, "Studio" is a common noun that refers to the art space where his art is created. "Lenca" is a proper noun. It is the name that an ancient tribe in the Central America identifies with themselves. This "Lenca" is the tribe from which Studio Lenca came.
Lenca have inhabited the Central America for thousands of years, especially in the area now known as Honduras and El Salvador. They were indigenous to this land. The archaeological researches have confirmed that Lenca lived in the region at least before the discovery of the Americas by Europe. There were better known tribes in the Central America, such as Mayans and Aztecs, and Lenca was a tribe that maintained a distinguished identity, although there would have been constant contacts with the nearby tribes.
Lenca had their own language, their own culture, and their own religion. It is said that Lenca believed in the Great Father, the Great Mother, and the God of Time as their deities. Like many other indigenous tribes in America, Lenca exhibited a predisposition that worshipped certain hills and mountains as sacred.
The main industry of Lenca, both in ancient times and today, is agriculture, of coffee, cacao, tobacco, other various crops. Lenca have its own pottery culture from the ancient times, and its modern varieties are popular in the Western interior markets. (For more information, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenca).
With other indigenous peoples in America, Lenca suffered the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. Lenca had a large population before the conquest, but after that, its population was literally decimated just in 30 years, not by the war casualties but by the diseases brought by the conquerors. How this kind of catastrophes occurred in the human history is well documented in Jared Diamond's book <Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies>.
So, since then, Lenca lost their native language and most of them converted to Catholicism. After 300 years of the colonial rule, Lenca achieved the independence in the early 19th century. But their sufferings continued. As explained in the previous post, the Salvadoran civil war of 1979 to 1992, because of which Studio Lenca had to flee his family's homeland, was another catastrophe to the people of Lenca.
Studio Lenca had to spend his youth in a foreign land as "illegal aliens". For him and his neighbor Salvadoran refugees, their identity as Lenca, the ancient tribe of thousands of years' presence in America, would have been the only source of the pride that sustained their everyday life through hardship and toil. Their identity as Lenca would have been their anchor of spiritual perseverance.
The great book of Diamond <Guns, Germs and Steel> starts its memorable quest with the question asked by a local Papua New Guinean named Yali “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”, a question that so excruciatingly haunted the indigenous people in Melanesia for hundreds of years since their disastrous contact with the outsiders. Likewise, a question of "Why is it that the people of Lenca, the ancient people of honor and nobleness, had to endure this scale of dislocation and alienation in the very land that were in fact their homeland for thousands of years?" would have bothered many Lencas.
Probably, Studio Lenca came to find the ultimate smile that soothed the anguish of his soul in the imagination of the ancient people of Lenca. Perhaps, this would be the reason why there are no spots of sorrow and despair in the art of Studio Lenca despite his painful personal memory of dislocation and alienation. Perhaps, for Studio Lenca, those who are dislocated and alienated are the modern people who have lost their memory of the ultimate smile of the ancient times, not the people of Lenca who still hold this memory. Because of this, the art of Studio Lenca carries the unmistakable universal message of smile of purity that transcends the painful traces of the human history.
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