(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, where he continues his artistic practice.
His work is built from an open and experimental conception of 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 environment and generating shared experiences. This conception has fostered a close link between his artistic work, education, and community work.
His teaching experience and his role as a cultural promoter have given rise to workshops, salons, plastic actions, exhibition projects, and interventions in public spaces. From these realms 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 acquired 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 Vargas state, Venezuela, as well as the execution of community projects, urban murals, and interventions in different public spaces.
Parallely, his work has formed part of solo and group exhibitions in Cuba, Venezuela, and Spain. His career has been recognized with various awards and honors, including three consecutive wins of the “Gran Premio Escaramujo Nacional en Artes Plásticas” in 2011, 2015, and 2017; the Gran Prize of the grant “Reino de este Mundo” issued by the Hermanos Sais Association (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 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 the city of 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 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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CIRCO
60 × 80 cm
2026.
CIRCO builds an impossible creature: two heads facing each other share a single body and seem trapped in a permanent confrontation. The image starts from the fish as a recognizable element, but it transforms it into a hybrid organism, exaggerated and almost scenic, where the natural takes on an absurd and unsettling condition.
The open mouths, teeth, large eyes, and the tension between the two heads turn the encounter into a metaphor of competition, confrontation, and voracity. None can advance without dragging the other; none 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 clash even when we are part of the same structure.
The title CIRCO shifts the image into the realm of spectacle. The confrontation ceases to be only conflict and becomes representation: looking and being looked at, exhibiting, exaggerating, occupying a position within a scene. Under this reading, the grotesque and the theatrical function as resources to speak of a reality where the confrontation can end up as entertainment.
Oxidized, earthy tones contrast with the blue background and reinforce the appearance of a creature born between what is organic and what is built. The fish ceases to belong entirely to nature and becomes a kind of artifact, a body altered by the tensions of its own environment.