Vernissage: Saturday January 11, 5 to 7 pm

The work of Camila Oliveira Fairclough (Rio de Janeiro, 1979) playfully navigates the contours of figuration and abstraction within the imagery and language of popular culture. She borrows from everyday mundanity and translates it into a painterly practice that likes to toy with what canonically is and what is not considered painting. Arguably, her work reflects on the idea of painting in a tongue-in-cheek manner, yet behind the humorous facade there lies an interest in the linguistic process that occurs when painting words and symbols. Captured in painting, the meaning of a word or a symbol starts fading away whilst the image emerges, becoming something else. 

Camila Oliveira Fairclough is interested in the ambiguity between what is visible and what is readable, or, in other words, images as words and words as images. In a similar vein to the ready-made, she thinks of her work as an unexpected encounter with an object in which what is represented is at odds with its medium. Despite the apparent obviousness of the subjects in her work, painting imbues them with a certain degree of ambiguity, complicating their seeming simplicity.