Numerical symbols were once imbued with mystical and magical properties. The study of their patterns and arrangement was regarded as a form of divination. The Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras and his followers worshipped numbers and believed everything that can be known is encrypted within it and whosoever can deconstruct the theory of numbers can unlock the secrets of the universe. Pythagoras had such inordinate reverence for numbers that he was believed to have sentenced a member of his own sect to death to prevent the sharing of irrational numbers with the outside world and betraying the imperfections of their deity. As the ultimate abstraction of reality, the idealized form or pure thought was considered more real than what can be perceived by the senses.

Nilo Ilarde’s praxis has a distinct reductivist predisposition: Calculating and reticent, his materials are dense, recondite; his work is often stripped down to its bare essentials, rarely embellished, if at all; his methods involve a constant layering process not unlike painting albeit more in a figurative rather than  literal manner, involving exposure and concealment, sedimentation and erasure, deception and revelation. In his oeuvre we often encounter a clean slate–a tabula rasa–where old familiar spaces or objects are recontextualized as the mind’s eye fills the gaps and allows new ways of seeing and beholding.

Drifting with the multiple undercurrents in Ilarde’s minimalist approach, the work also grapples with the concept of infinity, a mathematical paradox the mind can intuit but can only attempt to confine or define that which is essentially uncontainable, and, as finite beings trapped in this mortal coil, can never completely fathom.

In his current installation entitled, “In the Middle of Things But at the Center of Nothing,” the artist utilizes numbered foam puzzle mats laid out in a seemingly random sequence across the gallery floor and covering most of the entire surface. These modules exude an air of nonchalance and the benignity of a child’s playroom with primary and complementary colored cells serving as allegorical building blocks or as the fundamental ABCs of art. The basic elements emit cognitive learning while ambiguously operating as subterfuge or distraction.

Equivocally invoking Pythagorean mysticism, the infinite numerical figure plotted in the puzzle mats is, in actuality, a geodetic computation of the entire surface area of the planet in square feet. The gallery space thus functions as Earth substitute surveying from a topological vantage point of a satellite and plotting flatness of the earth like a supine painting on canvas on the gallery floor. The installation references the planet as vessel and object; as the container and the thing contained, a virtual representation of the earth and all the known things in it.

From a literal standpoint, the average distance between the viewer on a flat plain and the horizon is approximately 5 kilometers in all directions, but Ilarde’s exhibition title also hints at a different ground zero.

In Jorge Luis Borges’ seminal fiction “On Exactitude in Science” the architects of an ancient kingdom obsessed in cartography created a map so detailed it needed to be overlaid on the territory it represented. The short story ends with cautionary regret, “In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”

An inverse imagery occurs in Baudrillard’s “Desert of the Real” where the stakes are raised. In this instance it is the map that remains and reality fragmented and in tattered ruins, precariously clinging to the map; the signifier usurping the role of the signified. Perhaps alluding to our modern day wasteland; the highly urban, media-driven, info-saturated capitalist system where we find ourselves lost in the ‘map’ itself, the actual terrain dissolves into a labyrinth that is unnegotiable and unnavigable.

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