Nilo Ilarde’s What Do Objects Want? The Lives and Loves of Objects is a veritable ode to everyday objects. One of the few conceptual artists who have remained resolute in their pursuit of aesthetics in the realm of ideas, his works are stoic and recondite, unadorned and with an almost-disdainful regard for ornamentation. His art focuses on the objects themselves and the stories they seem to possess, rejecting superfluous design and embellishments, and trusting in the object’s inherent capacity to hold attention through its latent gravity, history, and discourse.

The artist deliberately alters MO_Space’s exhibition space, imbuing it with the character of an abandoned workshop or warehouse where lost relics bear mute witness to the passage of time. The gallery’s track lights are unutilized, and the space is flooded with the ambient glow of discarded mercury street lamps strewn across the floor like oversized trouble lights. For decades, these junked lanterns actually lined the University of the Philippines’ academic oval where the artist used to run with other fellow artists. In the gallery, they illuminate the objects with a familiar incandescence. The low light source, vaguely reminiscent of a campfire glow, casts curious shadows on the walls where the viewers would normally expect the works to be.

These functional found objects are a compelling installation in themselves that could virtually wash out the smaller, more intimate artworks and render them almost incidental—if not for the sheer density and presence of these objects. Disengaged from the gallery walls, the works are freestanding and mostly viewed below eye level (some pieces practically hug the floor), emphasizing the constant hold of gravity on the works.

Situated near the gallery entrance, the first installation the viewer encounters is a schoolyard swing from which, suspended on a wire cable and secured by c-clamps, hangs a set of wooden gun rattles. Entitled “Gun Toy,” these ubiquitous noise-makers hawked outside churches from Sundays of long ago are in fact replicas cast in actual gunmetal by actual gunsmiths from Armscor, a local gun-making company. Individually casted and reassembled as any other product on its assembly line, these intimidating imitations capture the original in detail—down to its wood grain and its clacking swivel that makes the unmistakable rat-a-tat. This installation sets the tone of the exhibition outright. With the slightest hint of whimsicality, there is a glint of nostalgia inherent in the works but none of sentimentality. Instead, in those playful relics of a bygone era, we catch a glimpse of the first stirrings of fetishism or fixation for an object.

By the same token, the swing, a found object clumsily painted red, yellow, and blue, becomes a metaphor for the rudimentary playground. The playground is also an object of our formative years when we learned the basics. The ABC’s are not too-subtly hinted at by the large ‘A’ of the swing’s profile and its primary colors. And yet playtime is also interchangeable with downright dirty work: these swings often have a double existence as rigs for overhauling engines at the local repair shop.

“Snow White in the Wrong Story” illustrates a constant motif in Ilarde’s works where the line between the artwork and the vessel that contains it is often blurred: be it the frame or pedestal, the gallery space or site. Here, a pedestal becomes the artwork itself: a Minimalist sculpture made of plaster and dissected laterally, with one-half made to spill on the floor like a blanket of snow. The whiteness becomes a metaphor for purity that is no longer attainable in today’s post-modern context, and its discourse like spilled milk or untainted snow—now to be only regarded as a lost paradigm.

“Brushwork” features two paint brushes on top of two chairs that face each other. The brushes are laid tip-to-tip as if painting each other—each a simulacrum of the other, cast in oil and resin. The chairs are set symmetrically, as if contemplating its ersatz mirror-half or subjecting itself to a 3rd degree cross-examination of itself. Around the chair is the peeled skin of paint from its own surface, stripped with paint remover by the same brushes that lie on it. The stripping away of the paint becomes a negative gesture that exposes the object’s true nature, and the act of erasing becomes an act of painting itself.

“Bookends for Serra” casts in iron the individual organs and body parts of a human anatomy doll and reassembles them to prop up Serra’s sculpture book. Recalling the tenuous balance of the formidable prop series with which Serra’s massive structures loom, the artist reproduces this precarious balancing act with the same material but cast in human form; perhaps to put warmth and character to Serra’s cold, indifferent surfaces.

“Mint Condition” features a weighing scale on top of an abject, makeshift side table, which is actually cast in steel. This rough product of bad carpentry becomes a sculptural trompe l’oeil and is immortalized in this permanent state, and the imitation becomes more formidable than the original that does not even exist anymore.

On top of the faux-wood table, a scale balances two substances evenly. One is a set of rings, and the other carries a piece of candy. One is immutable and incorruptible; the other is temporal and consumable. They were cast by small-time jewelers that thrive as a community in Meycauayan, Bulacan. Both are objects of fetish and desire, depending on the point of view of an adult or of a child. Only here, the Lifesaver is cast in gold and the rings cast in confection. Mint Condition plays around the monetary value of gold and the Warholian Pep-O-Mint from which the rings are cast. On the level of desire, the objects on the table become interchangeable and reflect the same paradox as the table itself—they reveal a clearer awareness of the nature of things by representing what it is not.

“Bakawan” is a homage to the artist’s mentor and his singular entity in Philippine art. The piece of wood—a souvenir piece of mangrove root that was part of a seminal show by Roberto Chabet in the 80s—placed vertically on a tall pedestal becomes a virtual talisman, set like a totem in the middle of the gallery. Cast in graphite powder, Ilarde reanimates this sanctified, medieval-looking relic and becomes an installation on drawing in real space. The work directly references Chabet’s bakawan drawing series that has become a ritual drawing exercise which continues up to the present.

The viewer is literally compelled to bend down to look at “Alcohol Level,” a floor piece with three levels—indispensable gadgets for the proper hanging of artworks borrowed from different art galleries—precariously balanced on an upended, top-heavy bottle. The vial that holds the bubble is replaced with different intoxicating liquids: brandy, wine, gin, rum, beer, lambanog, etc., which might be deciphered as an in-joke on the difficulty of walking a straight line, or on-the-level when under the influence, or an oblique reference to barroom games that function as ritual bonding in a secret boy’s club. The work is also perhaps a personal anecdote of amazement at surviving the heady marathon-indulgences of college and the 80s.

The title, “The Complete Book of Drawing,” is based on the usual ‘how-to’ instruction book on drawing but is a cast of powdered graphite in the form of a heavy tome—like a book of revelations or a tablet that stands in lieu of the textbook. The voluminous book is set on a mound of graphite shaped like a miniature volcano or a volatile mixture of gunpowder. In this piece, all the materials and substances that the artist will ever need for drawing is cast in this art book. But instead of learning to draw from nature, as the usual lesson books impart, the work posits an inquiry on the true nature of drawing.

Serra’s seminal “Splashing,” where the artist cast molten lead into the juncture between the floor and the wall, inspires the piece titled “Drawing a Line Between Painting and Sculpture.” Here, Ilarde constructs his own floor and wall using plywood and parquet flooring fixed by clamps without screws or nails, to set up his own discourse on the subject matter. In this no man’s land where floor meets wall, a battered and almost-invisible Mongol pencil cast from its own lead finds and defines its niche, drawing a literal dividing line between these two distinct working spaces.

“A Partially Buried Woodshed“ is an appropriation of Robert Smithson’s working title for an installation dealing with entropy. In Ilarde’s version, a crude scale model of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) is buried under a heap of paint flakes. This material was actually scraped off the walls of the building’s celebrated Small Gallery for one of the artist’s own solo exhibitions there in the late 80s. The then-three-decades-old venue was stripped bare to expose the wall panels as they were, revealing all the previous imprints and imperfections, scars and disfigurements from past exhibitions. The scraped paint is a virtual geological strata of historical material—an archeological repository of all the important exhibitions it once contained. Ilarde instinctively collected these striated, archival evidence trapped in paint flakes as a component for future works. In this particular installation, it seems to weigh our brusque disregard for our own art history, and instead of the remains of culture entombed in a museum or mausoleum, it is the museum itself, or the CCP, that is buried in its own remains—a once-proud institution buried under the weight of its own obsolescence.

There is an obvious reverence for the titans of Modernism in Ilarde’s work, and it is good that we are reminded of their hierarchy. But his works actually engage in their discourse and do not merely cite a litany of quotations to be name-dropped like schoolyard bullies to back up the work and intimidate the viewer. His works spring from a genuine regard and intimate familiarity with the material and subject matter.

There is, too, an old-school resiliency in his craft—he sticks to what he knows best. This, you can tell by the recurring elements that constitute the distinct iconography of his work. You can almost predict what to see in his exhibitions, which can be akin to rummaging through a tool box: a pencil or brush, a ruler, a level, standard measuring or weighing implements, fundamental tools that fix one’s bearings. Yet, his intimate familiarity with the material allows him to present the subject as something new and relevant. Painting or art without conceptual rigor and personal involvement with the subject is flat and uninteresting. The academic, historical references in his art intertwine with his own personal history.

Ilarde may not be the most prolific artist around, but one has to view his body of works as an ongoing series that is fully appreciated when viewed as a continuum; evolving incrementally, it grows richer in the retelling. When his exhibitions are seen as a protracted game of longevity, it separates the artist from the novices, the dilettantes, and the poseurs. In the end, it’s not so much the novelty of an idea but the constancy and singularity of the work, and how with minor refinements or readjustments, something so simple and self-evident can say so much.

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