Palmira Correa “La Casa de Palmira, Palmira's House” Venezuela Pavilion Venice Biennale Art Exhibition

Palmira Correa was born in 1948 in Venezuela, where she lives and works. Her works are exhibited in the Venezuelan Pavilion of the Giardini Biennale under the title “La Casa de Palmira”.

In this house in Palmira Correa, the body is at the centre of her creations.

The body of the earth, Gaia, is a wounded body, degraded, disfigured, and victim of so many aggressions such as deforestation in Brazil, a country close to the artist.

The body of a country is also part of his work, a country and a region that underwent colonization to eliminate many indigenous populations, a people that is neither European nor North American but a mixture of South American, African and Spanish blood.

It is a body that is decolonized today but in search of its own identity with such complex origins. A house-body, a body we live in, the home of the person we are.

But also houses in which our bodies live, houses sometimes integrated into megalopolises where the rhythm of nature is broken, accelerated, disconnected from our true being.

It is a habitat that gradually deprives us of our identity, so far from a more natural life where the house and its inhabitants also belong to the land surrounding them.

As Gaston Bachelard said: “The house is our corner of the world, our universe, our cosmos. It is body and spirit.”

We must give our body a voice again, let it live its passions, its feelings, its sensations, and allow it to once again become the first interlocutor of our mind.

Our body speaks to us; it is tired, thirsty, feels bad, tells us everything, and tells us everything until we die.

But we no longer listen to it; we have become independent of our body, occupied with other things, our body no longer speaks to us as much as it should, and our activities are no longer as related to nature as they should be.

This is how Palmira Correa exalts the history of her country and its people in her works, transmitting grace and freshness full of optimism and vitality by painting her characters in their daily lives.

Characters often represented naked, body and mind together. Natural nudity brings us closer to our true beings.

Palmira Correa represented herself naked in front of her easel or having lunch, or as a native person going about daily activities in the primaeval forest.

Images full of colour, life, happiness, and love.

Palmira Correa