Nilo Ilarde’s latest solo exhibition, If Your Work Speaks for Itself, Don’t Interrupt, navigates the intersections between image and word, drawing and writing, seeing and reading through the use of appropriated texts on the gallery walls. For generations, artists have used language-based forms as signifiers of information, laying emphasis on the idea over the visuality of words. By reconstructing lines culled from his notes and readings through the act of stripping away the layers of paint on the walls, Ilarde visualizes these statements both in a physical and conceptual space.

Activating an otherwise bare wall, Ilarde inscribes texts via scraping off the paint, revealing the bold letters and the raw surface of the wall. Ilarde has long been employing this process in his works as a form of excavation, stripping away the layers of paint to reveal both the physicality and history of the space. In the 90s, he stripped all the walls of the Small Gallery of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and gathered all the flakes of paint in a glass vitrine. He also performed this act in the former space of Finale Art File in SM Megamall. This gesture is similar to erasure: a strategy to expose the fine line between the visibility and invisibility of the act and the material. More recent works focused on texts, such as More and More of Less and Less, and Dear Painter, Paint For Me.

Ilarde proposes texts as readymades, preexisting forms of language not just to be read, but also to be looked at. One of the texts in this exhibition, “HALFABOTTLEOFBOURBONFORJASPERSJOHNS,” refers to an entry by Johns in his catalogue dated January 15, 1961. Pertaining to a house in Edisto Island, south of Charleston, South Carolina, which he purchased, Johns wrote:

Other lines quoted in this exhibition include “THE VOID SPEAKS IN EACH SENTENCE, BETWEEN THE WORDS”; “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE DEATH OF PAINTING?”, and for the eponymous work, “IF THE WORK SPEAKS FOR ITSELF, DON’T INTERRUPT.” With these, Ilarde comments on the conditions of art and language and translates the hybridity between words and image. By mining familiar slogans, he opens up new conceptual and typographic discourse and recontextualizes language into forms of both declaration and negation.

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