Elda Cerrato, artist of memory and spirit, has died

The artist, teacher and researcher Elda Cerratowinner of the prestigious 2022 Velázquez Prize, died of natural causes, at the age of 93, on Friday, as she was able to verify GlobeLiveMedia Culture with its immediate environment.

Cerrato broke down on Monday and was admitted to intensive care until Friday at the Trinidad Clinic in Palermo. It will be held on Monday 20 in the space of his last exhibition, the Paco Urondo Cultural Center (May 25, 201), from 15 to 20.

Born in Asti, Italy, Cerrato had an extensive creative and educational activity in Argentina and Venezuela (1960-1964 and 1977-1983), she was part of the CAyC and also had a long career as a teacher and researcher at the School of Art of the Department of Humanities of the Central University of Venezuela, as well as in universities and art schools in the country such as the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the UBA.

In 2022, she was rewarded not only with the Velázquez, an Ibero-American prize awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, but also with two retrospective exhibitions in the country. The first, at the beginning of the year, at the Modern Museum, where his first anthological exhibition is being held, with a selection that spans half a century of production carried out between Buenos Aires, Tucumán and Caracas.

At the end of last year, he showed up with B-sidea smaller and more personal exhibition, curated by herself, at the Paco Urondo Cultural Center, following a proposal from the Dean Ricardo Manetti from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), an institution where she taught and where she now worked as a “consulting professor”.

You may be interested: Elda Cerrato closes a great year with her most personal sample

She came to the country as a child and after graduating in biochemistry she devoted herself to art. During the sixties, he emigrated to Caracas with his partner, the experimental musician Luis Zubillagawith whom he had his only son, Lucianoexperimental filmmaker based in China.

Cerrato moved from collage to painting and made drawings, prints, installations, actions and films, in more than 25 individual exhibitions in the country and abroad, as well as in 150 collectives in Europe, in Asia and North, Central and South America. ., and participated in various Biennials.

was close to Aldo Pellegrini, Juan Carlos Paz, Oscar Masottaand was linked to the Di Tella Institute as well as to the Historical Center of Art and Communication (CAYC), where, among other things, he participated in the emblematic Collective action that the group performed in Roberto Arlt square in 1972, after the events of the “Trelew massacre” and which was censored by the police.

Next to Juan Carlos Romero He was part of the foundation of SUAP (Unique Union of Plastic Artists) and after moving to Venezuela during the last Argentine military dictatorship, he joined the cultural milieu of Caracas and, in particular, the group El Techo de la Ballena. There she was also a founding professor of the Central University School of the Arts.

In his work, personal and collective memory coexisted, although his early work focused on geometric research and spiritual research after his experience, with Zubillaga, in the first groups of the mystical master Georges Gurdjieff in Latin America.

“My first work was more of the collage type, more random, which was the first exhibition I did in Venezuela and later an expression of my research appeared in the hills of Tucumán, the be betawhich had certain characteristics, which I called this period cosmological“, he explained in his last interview with GlobeLiveMedia Culture.

In Tucumán, Cerrato observed a series of UFOs through the window with Zubillaga (1928-1995) on several occasions in an experience that, she told this outlet, was shared by the rest of the locals. of the region and which convinced her even more. .of his spiritual quests.

“It was a very unique experience, after talking with the neighbors we discovered that it was something very common, they were already used to these apparitions in the sky. Somehow, I I felt the Beta Being fall to the ground, and there I made contact with another reality. It had already crossed me enough during my stay in Venezuela, that the group with which I was always linked was always borderline , which was leftist and surreal,” she said.

After the dictatorship, his work took a more powerful political turn, and he participated in various collective actions to denounce the dangers and injustices that afflict democratic life, violence, economic, political and social crises in the country and the region.

“It is not easy for me to differentiate my life from my painting, my professional works from my personal works, because in some respects they have been intertwined in a rather tangled plot, being very intimately linked to each other: c this is how I find myself and in myself and with others,” she writes in edge memory, 2015 book published by the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UBA. In 2022, for its part, the Modern Museum published Elda Cerrato: The Wonderful Day of the Peoples.

“Although my production has not followed a linear path, with multiple entrances and exits, a constant sometimes more hidden than others, it underlies the entire field of its course. It is the theme of personal and collective memory, from the first collages, with immersions in the unconscious then, in large empty spaces and visions of the world as memories of other times”.

Continue reading