Ian Mont (Yamil Rodríguez Montaña, Puerto Padre, Cuba, 1972) is a visual artist whose current work focuses on matter-based painting, rich in symbolism and expressive gesture. His training began early as an apprentice in Cuban painting workshops. Later, he studied photography at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana from 2001 to 2006, a period in which he also explored conceptual art, installation, and video art. During the 1990s and early 2000s, he held numerous solo and group exhibitions in Cuba.

In 2006, a scholarship from the Fundación Carolina took him to Spain. At that moment, he chose not to return to the island, beginning an exile that marked a vital and artistic rupture. Most of his previous work was lost or scattered, and for more than a decade, painting was pushed aside as he worked in various fields to survive.

His artistic rebirth came in 2018, when he returned to painting with renewed energy. Since then, his work has evolved into a personal aesthetic that fuses influences from abstract expressionism and neo-expressionism, with clear references to artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning, and Antonia Eiriz.

Ian works on supports such as burlap, raw canvas, and prepared fabrics, exploring industrial materials and intense material textures. His painting becomes a space of symbolic confrontation where exile, loss, political language, displaced bodies, and the desacralization of religious and national symbols converge.

He currently lives in Barcelona, where he produces a critical, visceral, and deeply poetic body of work marked by the experience of displacement.