If Your Work Speaks for Itself, Don’t Interrupt reflects Nilo Ilarde’s interest in the formal and conceptual conditions of art and language. Quoting from texts that he has read, Ilarde visualises these statements and reconstructs them, giving them an appearance that amplifies, but also offer nuances to their meaning. Here, Ilarde has taken as subject a statement by American industrialist Henry J. Kaiser on how quality products speak for themselves.

Notice how the work, unlike the others in this exhibition, is not accompanied by a standard exhibition label. Rather, the work itself is its own exhibition label, to be read as well as to be looked at, while the exhibition space becomes the conceptual ground necessary for the work’s comprehension. Ilarde considers both text and the exhibition space as ready-mades, exploring the relationship between art and their spaces of display as a commentary on art and the context of its circulation.

A paradoxical humour arises through Ilarde’s technique: the work is an unpainted painting. The text manifests on the wall by a process of subtraction. The paint surrounding each letter is scraped off the wall; the exposed raw surface delineates the painted letters. Ilarde has long employed this process in his works as a form of excavation—the exposed wall and flakes of paint on the floor reveal both the physicality and history of the space. It is painting through erasure, exposing the fine line between the visibility and invisibility of the act and the material.