Born in Athens, Greece, Eleni Daferera is a visual artist, architect, and interior designer. A graduate of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, School of Architecture, she also attended London Guildhall University, School of Art, Architecture and Design, as well as the open studio on graphic arts and printmaking techniques by the renowned Austrian artist Gunter Damisch in the Fine Arts Academy of Vienna (Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien).
My artistic practice – drawing, painting and collage making– has been developing in Athens, Greece, London, U.K., and Vienna, Austria where she also collaborated with Kulturkontakt Austria offering visual arts and architecture workshops. The artist now lives and works in New York and Paros Island Greece, exhibiting my artwork both in solo and group exhibitions, while also working on book illustrations.
Her professional career as an architect and designer has exposed her 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, the artist presents views of collage and in two main themes: the dark and blurry figures and the utopian ambiances of human imagination.
Eleni explores 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.
She aims 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. Eleni strives 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.