Biography
by Marcos Krämer
Like some great occult tale, this story might begin with a black book, a handbound edition of a hermetic volume: Living Time and the Integration of Life (1952), by Maurice Nicoll. This was the book that, in Lomas de Zamora in 1954, forever joined the hands of Elda Cerrato and Luis Zubillaga, bringing shared readings and thoughts that served as a support for the practice of both artists. But if we think about the germ of this relationship between artistic practice and metaphysical researches, it can also be dated to 1966, when Cerrato had her encounter ‘of the third kind’, in La Banda del Río Salí, Tucumán, an event that proved to be the crucial invitation to expand her curiosity about the broad horizon of lives crossing the universe, the result of which was an extensive and enigmatic series of paintings. The beginning of the story can also be thought to date from Cerrato’s second stay in Venezuela, in 1977, when, in a move to self-imposed exile, she decided to cast off her life in Buenos Aires and retether it in lands that knew nothing of life-threatening political persecution. The questions then are where to start the biography of an artist whose works have been devoted to thinking about memory and time, among other things, and does it makes sense to assign a single point of entry to her life-story when each change of home and territory was the beginning of a new life? The opening date of Elda Cerrato’s worldly life was 14 October 1930, in Asti, Italy, the centre of a Europe convulsed and strained by the rise of Fascism. The resurgence of Mussolini’s regime forced her father Luis to seek the family’s exile in São Paulo, Brazil, where Elda and her mother joined him in 1938. In 1940, her father’s difficulties at work took the family to Argentina, and they moved to Adrogué, in the south of Greater Buenos Aires.
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