Elda Cerrato

Asti, Italia, 1930 - Buenos Aires, Argentina 2023

            Elda Cerrato's first pieces exhibited in public reveal a crossover that functions as a hallmark of her visual work in the early 1960s: traces of her training as a biochemist and the attraction to the “low knowledge” that will be deployed throughout her career. From the mysticism of George Gurdjieff, the alternative Eastern cosmologies, the surrealist imagination, and even the worlds of science fiction, this artist, close to informalism, arranges axes in her pieces that run transversally through her work. Cerrato thinks beyond the borders of her own perception and questions individual consciousness, combining science, politics and art.

            The change of the decade, her temporary abandonment of painting, and the beginning of her conceptual stage gave way to other formats, such as video, objects, panels, and heliographic prints. The radicalization in the field of politics begins to influence her poetics. Having lived all her life between two homelands, Argentina and Venezuela, Cerrato intervenes in maps of Latin America. The artist's action takes place during a geopolitical moment, in which public discourses are raised in favor of a continental identity, and global movements are produced, in which the shadow of the North American intervention in the region gains strength and visibility. Her series Geohistoriografía works with the meanings assigned to cartographic discourse, to make political tensions, cultural identities, and collective subjects visible. Thus, the artist's spiritual and interior exploration coexists with an exterior and social search that gives shape to a particular humanism, not concerned with defining and isolating the human essence of the human, but rather with detecting its protean and mutable character.

            In recent decades, Cerrato's work has sought to denounce the functioning of certain institutions of democracy, such as justice, as well as to return to the sources of her spiritualism, by drawing on the figure of Carlos Castaneda. Perhaps, the great theme of Cerrato's work is the illumination of this common zone between two dimensions, the strange and powerful space located between the esoteric and the exoteric.