The Incredible Journey of Corazon Volador: Coincidence or Message from Hereafter?

I am not a professional art collector. I am simply very good at finding reasons to wander through Japanese surplus shops here in the Philippines. Usually, I am curious about an object. Occasionally, an object gives me a story I could never have expected.

In September 2023, I stepped into one warehouse in the thick warmth of a dusky afternoon. It was cluttered, quiet, and drowsy with still air. I hadn’t planned to visit that day, but something nudged me there. Call it instinct. Call it fate.

A painting caught my eye among the stacks of forgotten frames and half-wrapped ceramics. It was leaning against a splintered cabinet, half-hidden in shadow. The colors, though dulled by dust, pulsed with an inexplicable energy. I felt wholly and instantly certain: this was no reproduction. This was an original, and it was meant to be found. The signature “Patrone” was upside down, which led us to hold the painting upside down in the first place. Lizz was a bit scared by it as she saw that the woman was falling. So Lizz begged me to put this painting far from our staircase.

Looking for the artist

Back home, I traced the signature to Virginia Patrone, the Uruguayan artist. Her official website is a better place to explore her work than a brief biography from me. My immediate question was about this particular painting.

But the painting itself—the one I held in my hands—remained a mystery. I couldn’t find its title anywhere and didn’t want to risk damaging the sealed frame to investigate. I sifted through online archives and museum posts, including one from the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales de Montevideo—still, nothing.

A message—and an unexpected reply

I found her on social media, sent a message and attached a photo of the painting. I expected silence or a polite, distant reply.

Virginia’s reply was warm and deeply moving. The history that follows is what she shared with me about the painting and her connection with Ms. Hisako Oya of Tokyo.

Only six days before I found the painting—on September 10, 2023—she had posted two new works in memory of her beloved friend and patron, Ms. Hisako Oya of Tokyo. Ms. Oya had referred to herself as Virginia’s “Japanese mother,” born on the same day as Virginia’s mother, in the same year. Their bond was personal and symbolic, as if the universe had stitched them together with threads from another realm.

The painting’s journey to Japan

Ms. Oya, visiting an exhibition in San Diego with the Japanese ambassador to Uruguay, discovered Virginia’s work. Soon after, Virginia was invited—seemingly out of the blue—to the Japanese Embassy in Montevideo. There, she was handed an invitation and plane tickets to exhibit at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Art Museum. The costs, she would learn, had all been covered by Ms. Oya.

Every painting was sold at that exhibition, except one.

Virginia had personally carried one piece to Tokyo. A gift. A thank-you. A tribute.

That painting was called “Corazon Volador” (Flying Heart).

Something else she told me stayed with me: her work had connected strongly with German and Japanese viewers. Here I was, a German in the Philippines, with a painting that had arrived from Japan. I could understand why the coincidence felt remarkable to both of us.

More than an old frame

The frame is chipped and worn. In a surplus shop, a frame can sometimes attract more interest than what is inside it. I am glad this painting survived its journey intact. The marks on the outside are part of how it reached us.

But I believe that some things don’t need reasons. Invisible hands guide some things. A flying heart, after all, does not move in straight lines—it moves in spirals and circles, carried by winds we cannot see.

So here I sit, thousands of miles from Tokyo, Montevideo, and Barcelona, in a small room in the southern Philippines, writing these words to you. Next to me, resting in soft light, is a painting that crossed time, oceans, and sorrow to find its way home—not where it came from, but where it was always meant to be.

Finding it reconnected the painting with its creator and brought a friendship across continents into my own life. I cannot prove that invisible hands had anything to do with it. I can only describe the feeling it left me with.

For other objects whose histories followed them home, explore From the Collection.