(MONTIEL) 1985 - "IKU"

José Leonardo Montiel García (Montiel) is a Cuban visual artist born in Santa Clara, Villa Clara, whose career has developed across artistic creation, teaching, and cultural promotion. He currently lives and develops 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 of 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 creating shared experiences. This conception has fostered a close link between his artistic work, education, 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 areas he has worked on artistic training 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 particular 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.

Parallely, 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 Grand Prize Escaramujo Nacional en Artes Plásticas in 2011, 2015, and 2017; the Grand Prize of the Reino de este Mundo scholarship awarded by the Asociación Hermanos Sais AHS in 2017; the First Prize of the Small Format Salon in 2018; and the Prize of the First Rural, Urban, and Seascapes Salon 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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IKU

73 × 100 cm

IKU presents a reflection on death not as absolute disappearance but as an inevitable part of the cycle of transformation of existence. The insect figure occupies space in a frontal and monumental way, becoming a presence that seems to situate itself between the natural, the ancestral, and the symbolic.

Its anatomy is built from contradiction. The body retains the external appearance of a living organism, while inside its wings emerge structures that recall bones, cavities, and organic remnants. Life and death thus cease to present themselves as opposing states to inhabit simultaneously within the same body.

The title IKU deepens this reading. In Yoruba tradition, Ikú is associated with death, an inevitable reality within human transit. From this perspective, the work does not intend to represent death solely through fear, but to approach it as a force that establishes limits, transforms matter, and reminds us of the fragility of all existence.

The intense red background introduces an atmosphere of tension and vitality. It may evoke blood, energy, danger, or birth, while the greens, blues, and aged tones of the insect build a surface where the organic seems penetrated by time. Death appears paradoxically surrounded by color and a powerful sense of life.

The insect thus becomes a kind of ritual body, a presence that forces us to look at what we usually try to avert. Its wings announce not only the possibility of flying; they also reveal what remains hidden beneath the surface of the body.

IKU speaks of the border between existing and disappearing, reminding us that dying is not necessarily the opposite of living, but a condition that accompanies life from its origin.