THE WONDERFUL DAY OF THE PEOPLES - ELDA CERRATO IN BUENOS AIRES’ MODERNO

From her beginnings, motivated by a deep curiosity for the mystery of living beings, the artist has cultivated the learning of diverse and challenging subjects, the presence of which can be observed in all her work: the study of biology and her interest in the potentiality of the scientific method, research on geometry and pictorial scales that marked her work, contact with George Gurdjieff's “Escuela del Cuarto Camino”, a centuries-old metaphysical and cosmological doctrine, and political debates with the Argentine and Venezuelan intellectual avant-garde in decades of growing tension. These axes in which art, spirituality, scientific knowledge and politics intersect without hierarchies, make up her advanced worldview. The strength of Cerrato's work resides in her fervent self-determination, which allows her to integrate knowledge considered antagonistic, push aesthetic limits and connect with the artistic environment in a transversal way. Her work thus acquires astonishing relevance today, as she engages in discussions with historical narratives both within the art world and outside of it.

After an abstract and informalist stage, faced with the growing institutional violence of the civic-military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina, Cerrato began a fervently political period, in which she built a set of images, thoughts and actions that linked increasingly the artistic avant-garde and the political revolution. She studied the identity of the peoples of Latin America, economic inequalities, struggles for territorial sovereignty and class conflicts, issues that she approached from the strategies of conceptual art and the visual language of the mass media. This is how the crowds, the maps, the aerial views, the workers' demonstrations and the symbols of Peronism became the mark of her most emblematic works and the keys to a critical position that she maintains to the present and that made her work an inescapable testimony of the political history of the Southern Cone.

The successive migrations that she experienced with her family and the contact with different languages ​​and social landscapes contributed to her enormous acuity to immerse herself in the context that surrounds her, both with the most concrete realities and with intangible experiences. Elda Cerrato's work is the manifestation of that ability to understand from the heart the essential nature of events.

Elda Cerrato is an Argentine artist born in Asti, Italy, in 1930. Since 1962 she has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Europe, Asia and America. Those made in the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas, Venezuela; the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C., USA; the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, and the Center of Art and Communication of Buenos Aires. She carried out teaching, academic and research activities in universities and art schools in the country and abroad, particularly in the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires during the sixties and seventies. She lived and worked in Caracas for long periods, the last between 1977 and 1983, where she also carried out her teaching and academic work at the School of Art of the Department of Humanities of the Central University of Venezuela. She is currently a Consultant Professor in the Department of Arts and researcher at the Institute of Argentine and Latin American Art History of the University of Buenos Aires, and an external evaluator member of other universities in Argentina and Uruguay. Since 1964, along with her artistic production, she has produced publications, short films and radio auditions, and has participated in conferences and congresses in the country and abroad. She lives in Buenos Aires.