Nilo Ilarde’s “Faulty Landscape”

On display at Art Informal until September 22 is Nilo Ilarde’s Faulty Landscape. Although they usually have simultaneous exhibits at AI, Ilarde’s brain space has occupied the three rooms and it is beautiful.

This isn’t the first time he’s worked with artists’ cast-offs, a mix of debris that permeate a painter’s home or studio. With paintbrushes, he creates a topography and with caps from the paint tubes, he creates a sky. This is also the first time I’ve seen a deconstruction and dissection of the paint tubes, however, when he peels away the wrapper to reveal the unused paint inside. The lazy thinker in me thinks that this is a manifestation of potential.

Since Ilarde has been collecting tubes since 2002, a lot of these discarded tubes are old and a whole bunch of them still contain something that has been declared unusable by the original artist. By peeling away the “obstruction,” in this case the tubes, Ilarde has found another way to use the paint as his medium.