ELDA CERRATO

The exhibition begins in 1965, following Cerrato’s return to Argentina after a stay in Caracas, Venezuela in association with a group devoted to the study of the mystic George Gurdjieff. During this time, Cerrato’s sustained engagement with Gurdjieff’s ‘Fourth Way’ and an extraterrestrial encounter inspired her ‘cosmovision’ paintings and the development of her Serie Entes Extraños. Epopeya del Ser Beta [Strange Beings Series. Epic of the Beta Being]. In these works, Cerrato sought to depict invisible cosmological and spiritual forces within an organization of forms firmly grounded in geometry. She rendered these compositions in an ethereal yet muted palette of black, white, silver, and gold.

In the early 1970s, Cerrato’s colour palette evolved, becoming more vibrant. In Despolarización mutua de dos entes. (Serie Entes Extraños. Epopeya del Ser Beta) Mutual depolarization of two entities. (Strange Beings Series. Epic of the Beta Being), a silver and gold depiction of the titular being is stark against an orange background. Represented in shapes reminiscent of her early biomorphic subjects—such as an oval, egg, eye, circle, and ovule—Cerrato’s Beta Being was ‘a character from the nature of our world,’ a spiritual presence arriving on Earth in a time of political tension.

This decade also saw the rise of what was to become one of Cerrato’s most iconic bodies of work: her ‘Maps and Multitudes’ paintings. Increasingly compelled to address the fraught political environment around her, and leaning into the pop-adjacent sensibilities of her bright palette, Cerrato honoured ordinary people and protestors by incorporating their likenesses in her paintings. Images of agricultural vistas, expanding cities, laborers, and students appear alongside maps of the Americas. Cerrato organided these compositions using geometric forms reminiscent of those that first appear in her 1960s works. Combining the urgent message of the people with her personal explorations into spirituality and philosophy, Cerrato refined a unique visual language that presented biomorphic abstraction and stylided figuration as an interface for both inner and collective resistance.