(MONTIEL) - "CIRCO"

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 in Spain and pursues his artistic practice there.

His work is built from an open, 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 take on special relevance.

Throughout his career, Montiel has understood creation not only as individual production but as a way of relating to the surroundings 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 led to workshops, salons, plastic actions, exhibition projects, and interventions in public spaces. From these fields he has worked on artistic formation and on 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 special relevance both in Cuba and in 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 collective 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 Prize of the scholarship “Reino de este Mundo” awarded by the Hermanos Sais Association (AHS) in 2017; the First Prize of the Small Format Hall in 2018; and the Prize of the I Hall of Rural, Urban, and Marina Landscape 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 Cultural Center “EL TUMBAO” in Alicante, and in 2025 he participated in the group shows 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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CIRCO
60 × 80 cm
2026.
CIRCO constructs an impossible creature: two heads facing each other share a single body and seem trapped in a permanent confrontation. The image starts with the fish as a recognizable element, but transforms it into a hybrid, exaggerated, and almost stage-like organism, where the natural takes on an absurd and unsettling condition.

The mouths open, the teeth, the large eyes, and the tension between the two heads turn the encounter into a metaphor of competition, confrontation, and voracity. Neither can advance without dragging the other along; neither can prevail without affecting the body they share. That contradiction makes the work a representation of certain human and social behaviors: we fight, compete, and confront each other even when we are part of the same structure.

The title CIRCO shifts the image toward the territory of spectacle. The confrontation ceases to be merely conflict and also becomes representation: looking and being looked at, displaying oneself, exaggerating, occupying a position within a scene. Under this reading, the grotesque and the theatrical function as resources to speak of a reality where confrontation can end up becoming entertainment.

Oxidized and earthy tones contrast with the blue background and reinforce the appearance of a creature born between the organic and the constructed. The fish ceases to belong entirely to nature and becomes a kind of artifact, a body altered by the tensions of its own environment.