(MONTIEL) 1985 - "ENLATADOS"

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 in Spain and pursues his artistic practice there.

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, training, 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 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 Vargas state, Venezuela, as well as the execution of community projects, urban murals, and interventions in different public spaces.

Concurrently, his work has been part of solo and group exhibitions in Cuba, Venezuela, and Spain. His career has been recognized with several awards and distinctions, including three consecutive wins of the National Gran Premio Escaramujo en Artes Plásticas in 2011, 2015, and 2017; the Gran Premio de la Beca “Reino de este Mundo” awarded by the Hermanos Sais Association AHS in 2017; the First Prize of the Small Format Salon in 2018; and the Prize of the I Rural, Urban, and Seaside Landscape 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 the city of 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”, VEARTE Gallery, Alicante, Spain, 2026.

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ENLATADOS

60 × 81 cm

ENLATADOS offers a reflection on how contemporary society transforms nature to incorporate it into its systems of production and consumption. Four fish appear compressed inside an opened can, ordered and contained in a space that eliminates any possibility of movement.

The fish, originally associated with water, movement, and life, appear here separated from their natural environment. It has stopped swimming to become a product. The can establishes a border between two states: what once belonged to nature and what humans have processed, classified, packaged, and arranged for consumption.

The repetition of bodies reinforces this idea. The fish progressively lose their individual condition to become similar units, organized within an industrial structure. Abundance then ceases to represent natural wealth and begins to reveal a logic of accumulation, exploitation, and standardization.

The intense reds inside introduce a sense of tension that contrasts with the metallic, cold tones of the fish. This opposition places the image between what is attractive and what is uncomfortable: the presentation seduces, but at the same time reveals the implicit violence in the process of turning life into merchandise.

The work can also be understood as a metaphor for our own condition. In a society that constantly classifies, organizes, and consumes, the human being runs the risk of becoming similarly “canned”: contained within economic and social structures that determine spaces, behaviors, and ways of being.