La Villa du Parc is pleased to invite Camila Oliveira Fairclough for her first solo exhibition at a contemporary art center of national importance.

The title Pintura (Portuguese for “painting”) can be understood as an affirmation of a practice and a central theme, as Camila Oliveira Fairclough’s work has continually explored questions of painting—questions that have arisen relentlessly yet with surprising freshness over the past twenty years: How to paint? What to paint? Why paint? For whom? These are questions that her paintings sometimes pose directly to viewers, with a familiarity and a certain self-deprecating humor that challenge the stuffy seriousness of art for art’s sake and its supposed elitism. This painting is intended for everyone—an everyday painting, as one might say of a piece of clothing or a not-too-complicated recipe. Indeed, it draws its inspiration primarily from words and things found in ordinary life, and in particular in our lives as consumers—people who are rushed, tired, and in search of comfort. For an art center in the middle of a public park connecting the city to the tram line—and if the artist hadn’t already borrowed this fast-food advertising slogan for a previous exhibition—the title could have been “Come as You Are.”

The exhibition features mostly new works, including a previously unseen installation stemming from the artist’s educational activities, as well as an artist’s book that will be offered to the public. It was conceived by Camila Oliveira Fairclough based on a reality specific to Annemasse: its multilingualism. The transition from one language to another or from one culture to another has shaped the career of this Brazilian artist, who grew up on the African continent before studying painting in Latin America and then in Europe. Her playful work, which explores the boundaries between the legible and the visible, is characterized as much by its generosity as by its economy of means. The concept of language learning—its pronunciation, comprehension (and potential misunderstandings)—is transposed into painting and the act of painting itself: painting, too, has its own languages, accents, and styles, its own methods of learning, and few magic formulas aside from practice. The exhibition will also showcase recent lines of work, revealing a newfound lightness—perhaps characteristic of artistic maturity—in her approach to drawing and her use of collage and textiles.

Julie Portier,
Director