(MONTIEL) - "PESQUERO"

José Leonardo Montiel García (Montiel) is a Cuban visual artist born in Santa Clara, Villa Clara, whose career has developed between artistic creation, teaching, and cultural promotion. He currently resides and pursues his artistic practice in Spain.
His work is built from an open and experimental conception of the visual arts. Drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, installation, and graphic design are part of a multidisciplinary practice in which materials, objects, and their possibilities for transformation acquire special relevance.
Throughout his career, Montiel has understood creation not only as individual production but as a way of relating to the environment and generating shared experiences. This conception has fostered a close link between his artistic work, teaching, and community work.
His teaching experience and his work as a cultural promoter have given rise to workshops, salons, plastic actions, exhibition projects, and interventions in public spaces. From these fields he has worked in artistic training and in creating spaces capable of bringing the visual arts closer to different communities, understanding culture as a territory of participation, knowledge, and transformation.
This dimension of his career gained particular relevance both in Cuba and Venezuela, where he developed artistic and community projects, urban interventions, murals, and sculptural proposals, in addition to participating in initiatives aimed at creating and promoting new spaces for the visual arts.
Among these experiences is the creation and promotion, in 2013, of the Armando Reverón Art Gallery in the Vargas state, Venezuela, as well as the execution of community projects, urban murals, and interventions in different public spaces.
Parallel to this, his work has been part of solo and group exhibitions in Cuba, Venezuela, and Spain. His career has been recognized with various awards and distinctions, including three consecutive wins of the “Gran Premio Escaramujo Nacional en Artes Plásticas” in 2011, 2015, and 2017; the Gran Premio del Beca “Reino de este Mundo” convened by the Asociación Hermanos Sais AHS in 2017; the First Prize of the Small Format Salon in 2018; and the Prize of the I Salon of Rural, Urban, and Marine Landscapes, Edelson Machado in 2019.
In recent years, his artistic practice has continued to develop in Spain. In 2023 he held his first solo show, NEGRO, at the Gallery / wine bar “VINAURO,” in Granada. In 2024 he presented the personal project NEGRO at the Centro Cultural “EL TUMBAO” in Alicante, and in 2025 he participated in the collective exhibitions AJIACO and MANIGUEROS at the Gallery “VALBUENA,” El Campello, Alicante. Collective exhibition “CONVERGENTES,” Gallery VEARTE, Alicante, Spain, 2026.

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https://www.vanguardia.cu/cultura/16073-leonardo-montiel-guerrero
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The work "PESQUERO" of 73 x 100 cm presents the boat as an architecture of memory, a body built to travel that seems paused in an indefinite time. Its aged structure, marked by textures, wear, and earthy tones, speaks of what remains after the journey: the traces of time, of labor, and of experience.
The contrast between the vessel’s solidity and the silent expanse of the blue background creates a sense of pause. The boat no longer seems solely destined to sail; it becomes a refuge, territory, and witness. It hosts the idea of departure and the possibility of return, two states deeply linked to the human experience of leaving a place without completely letting it go.
The presence of the celestial body on the horizon reinforces that symbolic dimension. It can be the moon, the sun, or simply a distant signal: a point of orientation amid uncertainty. Meanwhile, the lines running along the boat form a kind of cartography where each wear marks a journey.
The work thus proposes a reflection on travel, belonging, and memory. It speaks not only of moving from one territory to another but of what we carry with us when we leave. The boat becomes a metaphor for the individual: a vulnerable structure that traverses time bearing the marks of its own history.
The journey ends somewhere; memory keeps sailing.