Photograph of Nilo Ilarde's Surface: Left, Right, Top, Bottom, Front, Back. The work is the first installation in Ilarde's solo exhibition '4 Easy Pieces,' curated by Roberto Chabet in the Cultural Centre of the Philippines Small Gallery from 4 November - 1 December 1991.

Chabet wrote, 'Painting, its medium, its surface, its form, its content, its habitat, its history as process, object and idea - these are subjects for philosophical contemplation in '4 Easy Pieces,' a four-part suite of weekly changing exhibitions by conceptual artist Nilo Ilarde.

Using the perforated peg board as material and as metaphor for painting, Ilarde conceived 4 installations that examine and subvert assumptions about painting. This exhibition is about the perception of painting  - the seeing of painting, the thinking of painting.

The first installation titled 'Surface: Left, Right, Top, Bottom, Front, Back' focuses on the attributes, orientation and habitat of the painting surface, questioning its 2-dimensionality in the 3-dimensional context it is perceived. Here a perforated peg board wall (Ilarde's paradigmatic painting) built perpendicular to the gallery door, bisects the gallery space, forcing simultaneous front, back, and oblique views of the 'wall-as-painting' and putting in doubt the customary flatness of the modernist painting surface.

The second installation, 'The Picture Field: Visual Gag,' is a darkened room dimly lit by a TV monitor whose screen has been masked by a panel of perforated board, obliterating the TV's narrative representation and leaving only a grid of flickering light. This planar grid by its very flatness essentialises external reality, turning it into mere incidences of pointillist light. The picture field is shallowed into mere screen, filter, mask. It becomes a visual gag.

In the third installation, 'The Observer, The Observed,' floor to ceiling panels of perforated boards wall-in a narrow, tunnel-like cruciform space within the gallery. This is entered into directly from the gallery door. Encapsulated in this space-within-a-space, the viewer literally becomes the observed; the observed becomes the observer.

The fourth installation, 'The Grid: Mark, Matrix, Memory,' presents a bare, well-lighted gallery space. Almost imperceptible, like after-images, is a grid network of pencil dots covering the gallery walls. Traced from the peg board perforations, these marks read as 'drawings after the work' - memory points for a whole process of thinking and acting. This is matrix for the evolvement of ideas. This is a hologram, so to speak, bespeaking possibilities and becoming.

To the artist, art is an act of the mind. The simplicity, the clarity and brilliance that engage the mind as well as the eye in the exhibition are manifestations of thought processes made art.'