Introduction

If Mercedes Larreta’s genealogy as an artist were to be written according to the model Marcus Aurelius provides in Book I of his Meditations, it might begin with a strict chronology of her teachers and what she got from each one of them: from Eduardo Audivert (1990), the magic of watercolor and acceptance of the independent will of the drop and its pigment; from Guillermo Roux (2005), the soft fate of oil paint; from Norberto Marcet (2009), representation of the human figure and the reflex to capture the fleeting in its fleetingness; from Lima-native Eulogio de Jesús (2016), the freedom that comes from a honest critique of one’s own work.

Mercedes Larreta comes from a family of artists; she herself has, for years, divided her interest between painting and poetry.

Mercedes Larreta’s art, which never ever looks away from trees and rivers, begins with the joyous uncertainty of the line, with its unlikely outburst to then, pursuant to a maturation process that seems utterly effortless, deliver us back to drawing, no longer as contingency but as necessity. Wisely closed in on itself, each work offers us a chance to contemplate an open horizon.