Sitings: Nilo Ilarde's 'unpainted painting'

In which I fulfilled a big dream of mine, writing exhibition notes for one of my favourite artists

In unpainted painting, Nilo Ilarde endeavours to give emptiness a shape. Occupying all three spaces of Finale’s gargantuan warehouse space — an intimidating feat for most artists — these pieces reimagine art that rejects commerce and the artist’s impulse to fill a space up with objects, and instead approaches the gallery, the White Cube, as a readymade in itself.

Ilarde’s artmaking process often involves tedious and fastidious planning where, during the ingress, with time so close to the opening and unveiling of the work, there can be no errors. But, this comes with the acceptance of the fact that errors are a part of the process. There will always be unforeseen circumstances that require a response that may change the work and its meaning in the end.

Here, he excavates and reworks all three spaces of Finale, and in the process, uncovers built and obscured histories, recognising the preciousness of stillness and contemplating what can grow from it.

“Philippine Deep” occupies the Tall Gallery where Ilarde excavates a one-foot square cube of the gallery’s concrete flooring, and situates a ruler — a tangible symbol of a line that extends indefinitely — in the space made within the existing space, invoking notions of limitlessness, the emptiness of No Man’s Land, the unmined and the unexplored.

The ruler, a whisper of Walter de Maria’s “The Vertical Earth Kilometer”, shown in Kassel, Germany for documents, and Constantin Brâncuși’s “Endless Column”, Ilarde extends downward instead. It is propped up by scaffolding crafted by fellow artist Bernardo Pacquing. Sometime after the exhibition, the debris from the excavation will bury the ruler within the gallery’s foundation, forever invisible and insensible, but an addition nevertheless to an already rich history.

In the Upstairs Gallery, words by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist remain after the rest of the walls are stripped of the layers of paint that change exhibition after exhibition, exposing the plywood underneath. Entitled “FORGOTTEN CENSORED MISUNDERSTOOD OPPRESSED LOST UNREALIZABLE”, these words put to the fore works from the past and present that often escape recognition from artists, curators, and gallerists.

This is another kind of excavation, and a method of expression that Ilarde has utilised since 2001 for a show at the CCP Small Gallery. Peeling off the paint, you create something new through subtracting from what is already there. At the same time, you encounter the scars and holes from nails and hooks made from the gallery’s previous shows, uncovering material histories while inflicting an almost violence on the space a new one.

Like he does the white cube, Ilarde perceives words as readymades themselves, and the spaces between them as voids, necessary for the words to be understood.

The Video Room is transformed into a viewing deck, where it becomes an uninhabitable, protected site. “I AM INSERTING THIS ROOM ON THE WORLD HERITAGE LIST AS A PROTECTED AREA” attempts to reinstate the gallery as a sanctuary, as inspired by artist and environmentalist, Amy Balkin.

Ilarde asks, How do you reinvent emptiness? Yves Klein created “The Void”. Robert Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning drawing. Marcel Duchamp bottled up Paris air. Over the course of his career, Ilarde has alluded to emptiness through the vessels that have been emptied — paint tubes, souvenirs from defunct buildings — signals of the aftermath. Ilarde believes emptiness and silence should be protected, keeping the words of Douglas Huebler close whenever he creates: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”

And yet we can’t help but still make.

Confrontation with emptiness invites contemplation. What do you think about in the presence of absence? When there is nothing before you that inspires your own projections, what do you have other than your own faculties to make sense of the world and your place in it?

Experiencing an empty space is more precious than putting in a painting. “There is always a nail in a wall somewhere that can take a painting.” The void, emptiness, space: this allows what it surrounds to be illuminated. Set in contrast to nothing, some things are made visible.

Ilarde, who has only begun using search engines in the last three years, says, “We have no unassailable authority, standards, or universal truths. No one is ever right all the time. Every opinion is there to be challenged. With social media, it has become so much easier to do so.”

There is circularity in history, but there is circularity in commerce, too. Ilarde’s ability to pursue and create work that elides straightforward commercial valuation is only made possible by creating work that does contribute to commerce.

This work by Ilarde, viewed in its entirety, perceives the gallery — the white cube — as a readymade, and to consider it, in itself, as both the subject and object, and not just a vessel that holds other objects. Galleries give us space, all we do is fill it up. Taking his cue from Robert Smithson, Ilarde creates meaning by emptying it out instead of adorning it, and making this sacred space both a place and an object to be considered.

All three of Ilarde’s works dare to unravel themselves, pointing towards creating something within ourselves, instead of looking for more things to own, tangibly, as we give emptiness a shape and bear witness to it. 

Photos courtesy of Finale Art File. More information on the exhibition can be found here.