Born in 1930 in Asti, Italy, Cerrato was forced into exile with her parents due to the rise of Fascism—first to São Paulo, and later to Buenos Aires. During her artistic training in the 1950s, she engaged with geometric abstraction, Pythagorean proportions, and Gestalt theory. The Greek-Armenian mystic and philosopher George I. Gurdjieff was another formative influence, infusing her aesthetic inquiries with a vital spiritual dimension. With her partner, the composer Luis Zubillaga, Cerrato founded the first study group of Gurdjieff’s work in Argentina. Until the end of her life, she debated, disseminated, and practiced his “Fourth Way,” and followed the teachings of his exponents such as P.D. Ouspensky, Maurice Nicoll, and Rodney Collin.

From her first trip to Venezuela in 1960—on the invitation of a local Gurdjieff study group—Cerrato forged close ties with the Caracas avant-garde, notably the collective El Techo de la Ballena (The Roof of the Whale), which advanced a politicized strand of Latin American Surrealism. This journey catalyzed the first major phase of her artistic trajectory, when she mixed with key figures like the poet and painter Juan Calzadilla and the art critic Marta Traba. Cerrato embraced a technical and imaginative freedom that enabled her to merge the experimentation of her early years with Surrealist automatism and the biological forms that had intrigued her since her university studies in biochemistry. 

Untitled (1963), a painting first exhibited at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, belongs to the series Formas en origen (Forms in Origin), in which one perceives both automatist drift and a persistent interest in recording invisible structures: cellular formations and biomorphic shapes evoking microscopic enlargements. This Informalist phase in Cerrato’s art can be viewed as a substrate of images on which she would build her later work.

During the 1980s and 1990s, her paintings grew increasingly complex. Her color palette shifted, and the sense of scale expanded. The images center on the fragility of democratic institutions in the aftermath of a dictatorship: masses of faces represent the victims of enforced “disappearance”—human rights abuses committed in multiple Latin American countries under military rule. Works presented in the 1989 exhibition El ojo y la fisura (The Eye and the Fissure) introduced Aztec iconography and mythological symbols related to the earth goddess Coatlicue, suggesting a connection to ancestral memories rooted in Mesoamerican tradition.

Cerrato deepened her investigation into ideas of time, not as a linear progression but as an interconnected continuum—influenced by her esoteric experiences as well as by quantum physics and scholars such as the Chicana feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa. The concept of the past as an active force lying not behind, but ahead, was marginal at the time, but can now be aligned with contemporary thinkers such as the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Cerrato’s prescience was remarkable in this regard.

Rituals, ancestral myths, and personal memories guided her final works, which extended beyond the 2000s. The last series can be viewed as exercises in recapitulation—dream-like scenes in which the artist united fragments of her past works with intimate familial events without hierarchy.

Elda Cerrato’s work takes on a singular relevance when we consider that, even today, there is debate over whether Latin America has managed to forge a true artistic canon—one that stands apart from the legacy of colonialism and the many ways it continues to manifest in contemporary forms of domination. Her sovereign images offer up a revolutionary vision in response to a convulsive present.