The multi-talented musician Tom Zé, a key figure in the Tropicália movement, once remarked in his subversive dictatorship-defiant 1973 album that "every Brazilian composer has an Epic Complex" (a play on words with the Portuguese similar sounding Oedipus Complex). He nonchalantly questions why there’s “this damn concern of speaking and appearing so serious.” Tom Zé himself was often sidelined from the Brazilian music pantheon, partly because he poked fun at his peers and wielded silliness as his plastic weapon. Perhaps for artists in politically troubled places, a focus on everyday, mundane themes is easily dismissed, while international audiences expect grandiose commentaries. Ironically, that may make artists who embrace the ordinary even more heroic.

Made with, the first solo exhibition in Norway by Brazilian Paris-based artist Camila Oliveira Fairclough, does not suffer from such an Epic Complex. Fairclough’s work is playful, bringing together abstraction, color, and language in a way that resists over-seriousness. Her approach draws on influences like children’s coloring books, vernacular typography, decor magazines, and animal prints. Her often humorous compositions incorporate imperfections, revealing a human touch and lending warmth and intimacy to geometric abstraction.

In this exhibition, the silhouettes of a painter’s palette—a shape Fairclough often uses—carry an anecdotal tone. Growing up in Rio de Janeiro, she recalls how the palette’s shape echoes the organic curves of Roberto Burle Marx’s gardens and Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings—two defining influences in Rio’s architectural landscape. As Fairclough notes, Niemeyer would often compare the forms of his buildings to those of the female body, awkwardly playing on stereotypes of Brazilian women. The wall-painted giant palettes in the show function as a kind of emoji for painting itself, humorously reducing the works hung over it to single splashes of paint.

Fairclough is influenced by artists like Nelson Leirner, a former teacher of hers, who embraced lightheartedness in art. The exhibition’s title refers to a new series of watercolor drawings marked with stencil letters describing the place, time, or state of mind in which each piece was made. Examples like “Made it with my daughter,” “Made it in my office,” and “Made with love and patience” add a personal, intimate touch that invites viewers into  the spontaneity of her process.