Oleñka Cararsco exhibits “Patria” March 5 to April 5, 2025 at TOBE Gallery, Budapest, Hungary

PATRIA is the story of a life, but also the story of our lives… The word “patria“, whose etymology takes us back to the Latin term Pater, the father, with all the nostalgia, all the happiness and pain sometimes, but always with the heart. The father incarnated, yes, but also the homeland as the land of our ancestors, the one from where we come from, the one that is dear to us. Not to mention this red earth of Venezuela, that guides us through the work like a thread. Red like the anger felt faced with the double loss of a father and of the homeland and with the physical distance imposed by exile. This country where “there are so many deaths that cemeteries can not be finished on time”, this country that crumbles inevitably on the other side of the Atlantic, in the same way as the father figure crumbles, more than 7568,92 Km away from this artist, who now resides in France. PATRIA is Olenka Carasco’s answer to this forced exile, far from his family home, in a House on loan for a grief.

The artistic gesture of Oleñka Carrasco is of a particular strength, it summons personal and universal views and calls out to survival, liberating himself from the weights of our histories, of our losses and traumas, on the path to resilience.

Emmanuelle Halkin

Independent Curator