Eleni Daferera

My artistic practice has been developing in the past years in Athens (Greece), London (UK), Vienna (Austria) and, since 2018, in New York (USA). My professional career as an architect and designer has exposed me to a range of visual art techniques and has solidified a command over a wide variety of expressive tools and mediums. Through a visual narrative, rich with colors and shapes, I try to present views of collage and in two main themes: the dark and blurry figures and the utopian ambiances of human imagination. I explore formal aspects of the medium such as materiality, depth and scale, and how joining or disrupting lines of the human form can be used to convey sensual, dark or spiritual overtones.

I attempt for my work to transcend the assemblage of materials and painting, and incorporate drawing, construction, deconstruction and layering of fabrics, leading to the creation of hybrid creatures, bodies about to metamorphose and fantastic worlds bursting into colour around a luminous core. I strive to bring to the forefront the creative process itself, while at the same time exercising social criticism – a fitting tribute to collage pioneers – using techniques of both collage and decollage. Rather than only layering or removing, I cut and inlay image fragments into a larger image to create a unified surface, the negative of an imaginary quivering forest and landscape or that of an indistinguishable figure. These cut-out collages and paste-ups as well as the decollage and drawing technique used, represent a part of a larger idea, as there are also light projectors that cast the viewers’ own shadows straight into these narratives.