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.

ELDA CERRATO / EL DÍA MARAVILLOSO DE LOS PUEBLOS

From 1950, after finishing secondary school at Adrogué National College, Cerrato was caught up in a whirl of apprenticeships and new experiences. For five years, she studied Pharmacy and Biochemistry at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), in the expectation of finding an answer to the mystery of living things and the vastness of space and the planets. Two events opened new paths for her. On the one hand, there was a meeting with Luis Zubillaga in 1954 at the Juan María Gutiérrez Cultural Institution and Popular Library in Lomas de Zamora, just north of Adrogué. This led her to such mystical and esoteric texts as Rodney Collin’s The Theory of Eternal Life, Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii’s In Search of the Miraculous and the above-mentioned volume by Nicoll, which were to form the basis of her thinking, and these interests led Cerrato and Zubillaga, a few years later, to become involved in the founding of the first George Ivanovich Gurdjieff study group in Buenos Aires, together with Constance McNab, Eduardo Benderksy, Juan Otaño and Daniel Fariña. On the other hand, the painting classes with Oscar Capristo, a follower of Emilio Pettoruti, and later with Héctor Cartier, who introduced in Argentina gestalt and phenomenological gaze of forms and colours, infused in Cerrato a link between painting and geometric scales, Pythagorean proportions and the golden ratio as keys to understanding living things. In 1960, through the Gurdjieff group in Venezuela, the couple decided to move their life to Venezuela. Once there, Cerrato and Zubillaga came into contact with a group of artists closely linked with the goals of the neo-avant-gardes: the collective ‘El techo de la ballena’ [The Roof of the Whale] was a group of plastic artists, writers, film-makers and photographers who, crossing Marxism with Surrealism, undertook a multi-disciplinary artistic and political project at loggerheads with the state of play in Venezuela. Cerrato, for her part, began to adopt certain technical and material freedoms of Venezuelan Informalist Surrealism. Those years saw the beginnings – alongside her artistic activity – of her path as a teacher, which Cerrato followed at the UBA until 2017: in 1962, Cerrato held her first solo exhibition at the Gallery G in Caracas, began teaching at the Cristóbal Rojas School of Visual Arts and organized the Drawing and Painting departments in the city’s Contemporary Art Institute. Now pregnant with Luciano, her only child, she held her second solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas, where she abandoned collage and presented paintings with a conceptual narrative riddled with primordial biological forms in origin and expansion. That year, 1964, the couple returned to Buenos Aires and Cerrato exhibited the works of her Venezuelan period at the Galería Galatea. In the Argentinian capital, she met Aldo Pellegrini, to whom, in her words, she was joined by ‘an interest

BIOGRAPHY / MARCOS KRÄMER

in the inner vibrations of life’; D.J. Vogelmann, one of the first translators of the I Ching to Spanish, and Héctor Murena, an advocate of the Frankfurt School in Buenos Aires. Her partner, Luis Zubillaga, joined ‘Agrupación Nueva Música’, a dodecaphonic ensemble conducted by Juan Carlos Paz, his teacher and mentor since 1955. That year, however, Zubillaga was called to Tucumán to teach at the university’s National Music School, and the family moved to the University Town in Horco Molle. Amidst the ‘magic of the hills’, as Cerrato described it, she saw her first flying saucer and encountered a set of magical practices characteristic of the region’s rural peoples. Against this background, the ‘Ser Beta’ [Beta Being] was born, which, through her knowledge of the philosophy of Carlos Castaneda, the artist defined as an ‘energy body’. The same year she arrived, Cerrato exhibited her works at Tucumán’s Provincial Museum of Fine Arts and embarked on a teaching tour of the province’s sugar refineries, with the backing of the National Fund for the Arts and contents designed with Ana María Villareal de Santucho. In Tucumán, she directed the subject ‘Medios de expresión’ [Means of Expression] at the Faculty of Architecture of the National University of Tucumán (UNT), but did not join the university staff of the School of Arts, as her approach was the exact opposite of the artistic conservatism of those years. In 1966, she temporarily returned to Buenos Aires to exhibit at the Galería Vignes and was selected to participate in the Braque Prize. The following year, she exhibited her works in Tucumán’s Provincial Museum of Fine Arts: 28 works from the ‘Ser Beta’ series, a strange and novel presence in Tucumán’s visual universe, which earned her criticism and adverse comments. In 1968, at the height of the Onganía dictatorship, Zubillaga was dismissed from his university classes and the family moved back to Buenos Aires. Hostile as the atmosphere was, Cerrato’s academic and university career gathered momentum when she joined the architecture department of César Janello (1918–1985), a member of the Porteño concrete avant-garde and a pioneer in the introduction of semiotics in Argentina and its application to architecture. Janello was Director of the UBA’s Centre for Advanced Art Studies and founder of the Architecture Institute, and welcomed Cerrato as a lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Development from 1968 to 1977. There, Cerrato set about deepening the theories of the segmentation and structuring of perceptual modalities: colour, outline, texture and brightness. This new interest led her to study French semiotics and the theories of Charles Pierce, via Armando Sercovich’s courses, and to attend Umberto Eco’s 1970 seminar in Buenos Aires. The university environment nurtured conversations on politics with such fellow lecturers and researchers as

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Norberto Chávez, Miguel Rolfo, Margarita Gutman and Aldo Rivkin. Those years saw Cerrato’s first militant steps in the Peronist Youth and, as Head of Plastic Arts in the UBA’s Undersecretariat of Culture, she convened artists’ assemblies to continue bringing aesthetic practice and political struggle closer together. In parallel with this, she was involved with the foundation and executive committee of the Single Union of Plastic Artists, alongside Juan Carlos Romero, Diana Dowek, Ricardo Roux and others. This desire to strengthen artists’ trade union ties led her, decades later, to be involved with the foundation of Association of Visual Artists of the Argentine Republic (AAVRA), an association born in 2001 out of the need to organize faced with the destruction of culture and education, with a programme of discussions, the reintroduction of politics into art and urgent responses to the context. Also in the 2000s, Cerrato began a research project called ‘Registro de Artistas’ [Artists’ Record], a digital database of visual artists that encouraged horizontal exchange and hosted theoretical discussions and research papers. In those early years of political activism and university lecturing, Cerrato founded the PAQ-IN design and communication group in 1969, along with Luis Zubillaga and the architects Miguel Roffo and Aldo Rivkin, which, in 1970, submitted a project for the exhibition Escultura, follajes y ruidos [Sculpture, Foliage and Noises], in Rubén Darío Square, organized by the Centre for Art and Communication (CAyC). Between 1970 and 1972, sponsored by the CAyC itself, Cerrato and the photographer Ramiro Larraín made the animated short entitled Algunos Segmentos [Some Segments] based on the ‘Ser Beta’ paintings, which was presented at the ‘First Festival of Contemporary Music’. That year, she exhibited the series of isolated and non-isolated Ser Beta at the San Martín Cultural Centre and participated in Arte e ideología. CAyC al aire libre [Art and Ideology: CAyC Outdoors] in Roberto Arlt Square, the iconic collective exhibition censored by the police, with works by Víctor Grippo, Luis Pazos, Horacio Zabala and others. Cerrato presented two interventions at the show: one reflected on censorship through the literature of Roberto Arlt; the other set out to challenge the visitors of the different exhibition spaces with phrases printed on posters. Her enthusiasm for debates about economic independence, political sovereignty and Latin American identity grew with the return of democracy in 1973. From this period date her series ‘El sueño de la casita propia’ [The Dream of the Little House of One’s Own], ‘Geo-historiografía’ [Geo-Historiography] and ‘De la realidad’ [On Reality], with powerful echoes of the intertwining of her artistic searches and political goals. This last series was presented at her first solo exhibition at the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, in 1975, in which the painting La contradicción [The

BIOGRAPHY / MARCOS KRÄMER

Contradiction], crowded with characters making the paradigmatic V-sign of Peronism, was censored for political reasons. In 1977, in the middle of military dictatorship, difficulties at work for Zubillaga, who had been expelled from his post as Artistic Director of the Colón Opera House, the faculty’s low salaries, the threat of eviction and the fact that, in Cerrato’s words, ‘we were in several address books’,1 drove the family to exile in Venezuela. This second stage in the country was a period where there began to be ‘artistic production, jumping kittens, collective dreams,’ the artist recounts. In those years, Cerrato began to use the full tonal range in her pencil drawings, which bore other landscapes, even more numerous throngs and simultaneous images of different realities. That series of drawings and some new oil paintings opened the exhibition Fragmentos de la realidad [Fragments of Reality] in 1978 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas. From that year until her return to Buenos Aires in 1983, Cerrato lectured in Elements of Expression and Visual Communication at the School of Art of the Central University of Venezuela and was later head of the School of Art’s Plastic Arts Department. With the decision already taken to return to Argentina after the recovery of democracy, Cerrato presented her diptych Las memorias de nuestra sombra [The Memories of Our Shadow] in Caracas in 1983, an open indictment of the historicopolitical relations linking her two lives in the Venezuelan and Argentinian capitals. Back in Buenos Aires and moving out to Buenos Aires Province with her partner, Cerrato participated in the mass exhibition Homenaje de las artes visuales a la democracia [The Visual Arts’ Tribute to Democracy], which was staged across the city. From her return to Buenos Aires until 1989, Cerrato’s works were haunted by a concern with the ghostly presence of absences, with the memory, history and institutions of the recovery of democracy, in a dark and wary tone. Her solo show Memoria en los bordes [Memory at the Edges] at the Tiempo Argentino Gallery in 1986 was a condensation of this period: mists, buildings, walls and crowds. In 1989, with the presentation of her series ‘El ojo y la fisura’ [The Eye and the Fissure], at the Arte Nuevo Gallery, the solidity of her stages and buildings began to dissolve, and the mystical side of her narrative resurfaced. Over these years and well into the new century, Cerrato intensified her academic activities as head of the department Introduction to the Language of the Plastic Arts in the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts (UBA) Arts Degree and as the driving

1 A reference to the danger of featuring in the address books of political militants kidnapped and ‘disappeared’ by the dictatorship’s repressive operations groups: in the paranoid minds of the repressors, merely appearing in such a book made one a suspect of sedition and the potential target of further abductions.

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force behind the university group research projects around colour, images and memory. At the same time, she expanded her academic and art network in Buenos Aires through her participation in a series of group exhibitions, graphic interventions and performances. These included ‘Ilustre bolero 88’ [Illustrious Bolero 88], an international event in homage to the musical genre which she organized with Alfredo Portillos and Pedro Roth, the collaboration with the Grupo Escombros [Rubble Group] in La ciudad del arte [The City of Art] in 1989, Recuperar [Recover] in 1990 and Arte a la deriva [Drifting Art] in 1992, where Cerrato presented installations and performances, or her intervention of trees in the Tres de Febrero Park in 1994 as a tribute to the Argentinian sculptor Lola Mora. These activities also included Cerrato’s participation in such artist’s books as No a la obediencia debida, no al punto final, no al indulto [No to Due Obedience, No to the Full-Stop, No to the Pardon] (1989), La desocupación [Unemployment] (1998) or Urgente [Urgent] (2008), where she worked on the issue of agrotoxins, and her extensive participation with posters and graphics in exhibitions responding to a variety of contexts, such as Semana internacional del detenido desaparecido [International Week of the Disappeared Detainee] (1988), Un marco para la tierra. Proyecto de integración latinoamericana de arte y ecología [A Frame for the Earth: Latin American Art and Ecology Integration Project] (1994), Cuánta lucha. Muestra de artistas plásticos en homenaje a Kosteki y Santillán [How Much Struggle: Exhibition of Plastic Artists in Tribute to Kosteki and Santillán] (2005) and Cordobazo, ayer y hoy. 40 años [The Córdoba Uprising Yesterday and Today: 40 Years On] (2009). In 1995, Luis Zubillaga died, her life-long companion, and, in the words of the artist, the presences and absences she had recently been working on became intimately close and burst upon her own reality. From that day to this, Cerrato steered the narrative of her images in another direction and began a series of paintings around her personal memory and the recapitulation of her life. This was when she felt the need to paint Maurice Nicoll’s book Living Time and the Integration of Life and give a pride of place to the object that bound her life to Zubillaga’s, the black book with which it all began: love, mysticism and curiosity about the universe. That painting of 1998, Memoria primera [First Memory], from the series ‘Álbum de memorias’ [Memory Album], is the image that marked the start of a journey in time that Cerrato has embarked on in the latest stage of her work with the aim of looking back over her own story to find new momentum.