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CataLINa CHerVIN

1953 born in corrientes, Argentina
lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina

I discovered the drawings of Catalina Chervin in november 1996 during a visit to Buenos Aires. I had been
invited to give a lecture at the Museo de Bellas Artes at the kind invitation of Jorge glusberg. It was during this
occasion that Catalina Chervin introduced me to her astounding images of corporeal interiors. I immediately
recognized in her drawings a quality that belonged to the world of the fantastic. I felt them to be truly and won-
derfully obsessive. Obsession is one of the most prevalent tendencies among expressionist artist of the 20th
century. It is a feeling instigated by desire, by a longing to move from the material world into a spiritual state of
understanding, a need for tranquility. Chervin’s drawings are filled with a desire to understand humanity not as
individual beings lost in their solitary pursuits but as a larger body, where every person’s emotional needs and
anxieties are somehow connected to everyone else. I think of Chervin’s work as heroic in the tradition of the
great mythic artists -soya, Archimboldo, and Bosch-. Perhaps this is too facile an interpretation. Perhaps, it is
too obvious or even arrogant to suggest such a comparison. Yet I have seen Chervin’s tenuous lines, shapes,
and contrasting folds of light and dark. I have seen the utter abandon into her obsessive lingering of a form,
a bodily form, a moment of decay that suggest putrefaction an entropy, yet there is always the persistence of
hope. There is the hope in Chervin’s art that carries us into another stratosphere of being and of understan-
ding who we are and who we want ourselves to become. As I study and enjoy her drawings I am aware of the
fragility of human feeling, but I am also aware that the human mind is a great instrument that takes us into the
heart and soul towards a richness of experience. Catalina Chervin is such an artist an artist who takes us on an
intimate journey into the soul and who leaves us with light and a radiant simplicity of vision. It is this simplicity
of vision that can only happen through and extraordinary complexity of mind, an exuberant compassion that
touches humanity of all levels -both material and spiritual- and finally transcends elements that we understand
as the basis of all civilization.
(rOBerT C. MOrgAn, art CritiC, Poet anD artist).
pOrTraIT OF a wOMaN, 1997 Pencil And inK 92 x 69 M. / 35½ x 27 in. 
 sErIEs OF sHadOws 1996 PluM A cArBon 45 x 126 cM. / 17½ x 49½ in.

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