By Emily Burkhart
April 30, 2024
Eugenia Loli (b. 1973), High Cat, from the All Fun & Games series, nd. Digital collage. Image courtesy of Cargo Collective.
It's important for me to say something with my artwork, so for the vast majority of my work there's a meaning behind them. Sometimes the narrative is witty or sarcastic, sometimes it's horrific with a sense of danger or urgency, sometimes it's chill. I leave it to the viewer's imagination to fill-in-the blanks of the story plot.
-Eugenia Loli
Eugenia Loli-Quéru (b. 1973), known professionally as Eugenia Loli, is a Greek Surrealist collage artist, painter, freelance illustrator, and filmmaker. She is best known for her digital collages. She creates amusing, often piercing social commentary using images scanned from her collection of vintage magazines and science fiction. Some of her creations capture a moment in time resembling a still frame from a surreal movie while others are purely fantastical, juxtaposing mundane earthly pursuits with the unearthly. Her many influences include “The Matrix” films; David Delruelle, a Belgian collagist; Bryan “Glass Planet” Olson, an American collagist; Julien Pacaud, a French artist, illustrator, and digital collagist; Kieron “Cur3es” Cropper, a British designer and collagist; and the Belgian Surrealist painter, René Magritte (1898-1967). Before becoming an artist, Loli worked as an artificial intelligence (AI) computer programmer, a technology journalist, and a music videographer for experimental indie artists in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, where she lived for twenty years. Since 2013, Loli’s collages have been featured in Teen Vogue, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Forbes, VICE, Wired, New Scientist and The Guardian among other publications.
Eugenia Loli in an undated photo. Photographer unknown. Image courtesy of the Public House of Art, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Biography
Born in Athens, Loli grew up in the village of Skiadas in the Preveza region of northwestern Greece. She studied computer programming and analysis in college, and her first job was in AI. She is also the former editor-in-chief of OSNews, an online computing newsletter that had been established in 1997 but then languished. After a period of inactivity, Loli relaunched the site in 2001 and stayed until 2005. She has written a personal blog, entitled Eugenia’s Rants and Thoughts, since 2002. Loli made her first digital collage in April 2012 for an animated music video for the San Francisco Bay Area musician, philosopher, and political scientist John Maus. Besides California, she has lived in Germany, the UK, and Spokane, Washington. In early 2024, Loli and her French husband, Jean-Baptiste Quéru, a mobile software architect, returned to Greece to live in the Preveza area where she was raised. The following seven collages demonstrate her quirky sensibilities and techniques.
Selected Works
High Cat
Eugenia Loli (b. 1973), High Cat, from the All Fun & Games series, nd. Digital collage. Image courtesy of Cargo Collective.
In High Cat, from Loli’s All Fun & Games series, a long-whiskered calico wears thick, psychedelic cat’s eye-shaped glasses with multi-colored bullseye patterns on the lenses. Enveloped in a starry black background and with head cocked, a pipe dangles from the cat’s mouth billowing clouds or bubbles of cosmic “smoke,” semi circling the cat's head. These emissions waft toward what appears to be the moon in the upper left and Mercury to the right. This chill cat could be said to be “high” from the emissions of its pipe but also literally high as he/she improbably smokes in outer space.
Prophetic Vision
Eugenia Loli (b. 1973), Prophetic Vision, from the All Fun & Games series, nd. Digital collage. Image courtesy of Cargo Collective.
Prophetic Vision incorporates traditional Surrealist themes while reflecting the influence of René Magritte. Open doors as a portal to another world–in this instance, another planet–are a hallmark of Magritte’s paintings. In the foreground, a blonde-haired young girl wears a puffed sleeve 1950’s pink and white party dress with pink sash, white shoes and socks. She peers cautiously around the doorframe of a well-appointed home judging from the moldings and the candelabra to the right of the door, also a classic Surrealist pictorial device. The candelabra’s teal candles are unlit, suggesting the unknown. Outside an otherworldly landscape of dunes features two gleaming white objects–a pointed obelisk and large sphere. In the sky, the green glow of a flying object or of a planet (possibly Mars) illuminates the shapes and the dunes below. All in all, there is something wondrous and mysterious about the girl, the building and the locale.
Let Me Get That For You
Eugenia Loli (b. 1973), Let Me Get That For You, from the Oh, L’amour series, nd. Digital collage. Image courtesy of Cargo Collective.
Let Me Get That For You from Loli’s Oh, L’amour (Oh, Love) series, wittily explores a traditional heterosexual relationship dynamic. A smiling, 1950’s couple in a bright red canoe glide through a reddish-purple nebula in star-filled space. The couple appear to be on their way to or from a picnic judging from the wooden basket inside the canoe at the man’s feet. It looks as though Loli cut and pasted the image from a classic river or lake scene. The woman holds a water lily in one hand and a wide-brimmed straw hat in the other. One oar rests across the cross beam at the center of the canoe that divides it like the implied separate gender roles of the couple. The man holds onto the other oar while reaching down to pluck a star from the cosmic sea, for the woman (we suppose), hence the tongue-in-cheek title Let Me Get That For You.
Every Act of Creation is First an Act of Destruction
Eugenia Loli (b. 1973), Every Act of Creation is First an Act of Destruction, from the Mind Alteration series, nd. Digital collage. Image courtesy of Cargo Collective.
A surprising albeit gruesome work, Every Act of Creation is First an Act of Destruction, finds two men in black business attire with crisp white shirts sharing a meal at a fine restaurant. A folded white cloth napkin rests on the table in front of the man on the left who sports a pink and black striped tie while the man on the right has donned a white polka dotted black tie. On top of the aqua tablecloth are the pair’s water and wine glasses, a burning oil lamp, bread basket, and butter dish. Around their necks small flashlights or perhaps microphones dangle strangely from lanyards. They both wear what may be matching signet rings on their right ring fingers which could signify common membership in a fraternal order of some type–manhood, perhaps.
Loli has replaced the heads of both with explosions. The smoke and gas billowing from the head of the left hand man disappears into the horizontal picture frame behind him as though into the outside world, where a nearly cloudless blue sky can be seen darkening with his eruption. Behind the man on the right in a vertical frame, a craggy mountain range is surrounded by swirling mist and wispy clouds in a deep blue sky. The flaming explosion emerging from his collar also enters this idyllic scene. The enigmatic title of the collage is said to be a quote from Pablo Picasso referring to the necessity of the old being swept away before anything new can arise in art, much like his legacy achieved. With this collage, Loli may be saying that the old male-dominated order must be blown up before a more equitable society can emerge.
Quarrymen
Eugenia Loli (b. 1973), Quarrymen, from the Mind Alteration series, nd. Digital collage. Image courtesy of Cargo Collective.
The title Quarrymen refers both to the British musical group John Lennon founded in Liverpool in 1956 that preceded the founding of the Beatles in 1960 and to the Beatles’ groundbreaking 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles–Ringo Starr, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison–wore the brightly colored military-style uniforms depicted in the collage on the cover of this album. Loli matches the background stripes to the regalia of each of the Beatles. As in Every Act of Creation is First an Act of Destruction, Loli has removed their heads and replaced them with a surrealistic element but here, instead of explosions, she gives each man a bouquet of flowers. Ringo is on the far left in the magenta uniform, John is in lime green to the right of Ringo, Paul is in the blue uniform with his knees drawn up on John’s right, and George is in red on the far right. A brilliant butterfly perches on Paul’s right shoulder as another one hovers above the bouquet on George’s head. Loli has subverted the iconic album cover and created something new as do caterpillars when they turn into butterflies and as did the Beatles when they unleashed their masterpiece on the public.
Natural History Museum
Eugenia Loli (b. 1973), Natural History Museum, from the Reportaz series, nd. Digital collage. Image courtesy of Cargo Collective.
For Natural History Museum, Loli takes a black and white image of people contemplating what should have been paintings within ornate frames in a museum gallery and replaced the paintings. She instead inserts gigantic flora that literally bursts out of the frames making it indeed a natural history museum rather than an art museum. The viewers stand unfazed, quietly pondering the unearthly or possibly irradiated plant specimens. In lieu of an overhead light or chandelier and befitting the collage title, another huge spray of flowers hangs from the ceiling. A beach vista stretches beyond an open doorway in the gallery, where a saucer-shaped spaceship can be seen taking flight, suggesting that the UFO may have had something to do with the strange flora.
Global Toasting
Eugenia Loli (b. 1973), Global Toasting, from the Reportaz series, nd. Digital Collage. Image courtesy of Cargo Collective.
Global Toasting portrays an old Toastmaster toaster from the sixties against a black background. Loli has placed flattened color images of the Earth and Moon in the bread slots. The collage wryly conveys a warning against global warming. If we do not take action, the Earth will soon be “toast,” as barren as the moon, thus ironically making a very serious and cautionary point.
Recognition
While Loli has exhibited in independent galleries and shows, and some of her work is in the permanent collection of the unique Public House of Art Gallery in the Netherlands, she harbors a reluctance to market her work by traditional means. She has said that she doesn’t do exhibitions or work with galleries but does everything by herself online. Loli sells a few pieces a month but profits most from commissions. She has produced pieces for clients such as Urban Outfitters, Alice McCall (an Australian fashion house), and Venyx Jewelry. Loli’s collages can be seen in the films “The 9th Life of Louis Drax” (2016) and “Replicas” (2018). She has also created album art for the rock bands Highly Suspect and White Denim as well as numerous CD covers for various indie artists. In addition, she has illustrated thirty book covers, one of which was selected best book cover of the year by the The New York Times Book Review in 2016. Her collages have been included in the art books, The Age of Collage (2013) and Collage Makers (2015) both published by Monsa. In 2016, she released her own book, Living with Eugenia Loli: 32 Removable Art Prints that featured a wide range of her collages.
To learn more about Loli and see more of her digital work, visit her website on Cargo Collective and her social media pages on Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and Tumblr.