Silverlens is pleased to present Sa Ilang, opening 19 July and on view until 16 August 2025. On view will be large-scale works continuing the artist’s experiments using acrylic panels as syntax for assemblages. Accompanying them are diptychs and sculptures using low-profile objects typically discarded or ignored.

Employing industrial materials, Zamuco reengages with his early works, re-presenting them to make their meanings more precise. This includes transparent sheets, which began sometime in 2001. Still, this series is denser and more specific with its increased number of elements, making a complex geometric configuration. 

There are many ways to look at these works, which reflect Zamuco’s interiorization of skill and thought. One way to do it is to consider each acrylic sheet and element in the piece as an activation. Each of us accumulates memories throughout life: the news of war, the crunch of dried leaves on your feet, or the smell of grass after rain. Everything is a file stored in our heads, but the only way to access it is to activate it. The transparent layers are digitally printed with colored images of remnants gathered from nature or taken from his archive of family items.

In contrast, other layers are painted by hand with scribbles. Beneath the layers of these transparent sheets which are set with fasteners and screws are partially obscured fragments of wood, bits of metal, painted outlines in blue. The outlines are not easily identifiable, are the figurations mangled bodies or abandoned clothing?  Is it in repose or in pain? Zamuco’s pieces work best when they force viewers to slow down to comprehend what they are looking at.

He continually revises each assemblage until it achieves what he sees as its true perception. It is a way of assemblage he has continued to develop because of its propensity to voluntary acts of beginnings. You can start from scratch at each iteration and make it say a different thing each time at a turn of a screw or a fastener. Its created form speaks to a set of abandoned choices; it could have been left unfinished; it might have been, and still might be, destroyed.

The show also includes a diptych, two sculptures, and a long work spanning a wall over three panels. The diptych plays with the theme of the self in the wilderness as either a path to a metaphorical rebirth or a dangerous place one has to face. One panel is composed of a digitally printed photo of an old sink found inside a dilapidated house dating back to 1996, and another panel is of blackened wood bits chopped and installed oddly with a box overflowing with pinned silver ribbons. It is uncomfortable to look at as if something were struggling on the wall.

A sculpture composed of a mattress coil painted black with mirror glass flowers continues this feeling of tension and strangeness of not being at ease. Another sculpture is unexpected in its use of an iron column and discarded wood. A work composed of connected objects and panels is the opposite of the assemblages using acrylic sheets in the way it unfurls and loosens up what was wound up in the other works. Moreover, where Zamuco previously plays with degrees of opacity, this does away with that with levels of texture from acrylic paint or black ash. There is also a panel made from discarded clothing, a small bottle of kapok, and a cardiology machine component.

Zamuco’s works for Sa Ilang display how the artist’s practice is a lifelong pursuit of continual beginnings — not merely as a result of technical expertise deepened by time, but as a form of thought where material and form offer new possibilities of seeing and knowing.

—Josephine V. Roque

Eric Zamuco (b. 1970, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Manila) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers around filtering the ordinary and the unfamiliar. Raised in Manila, Philippines, Zamuco received his MFA from the University of Missouri in 2005 before relocating to Massachusetts in 2009, and back to Manila in 2012. His body of work has consistently focused on filtering his own displaced experience, and he explores themes of home, identity, postcolonial narratives, and the need for reclamation of space. His works, which span a diverse range of media, include sculpture, installation, photography, drawings, video, and performance, and serves not only as social commentary but also as self- critique. Zamuco is drawn to the unfamiliar, and his intention in transforming the commonplace is to pull the immaterial in an inquiry towards some kind of human order.

Zamuco was a recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award (2003) and the Ateneo Art Award (2005). He holds an MFA in Sculpture (2009) from the University of Missouri- Columbia. He was an artist-in-residence at the Centre Intermondes, France (2015) and was the subject of a solo- show Working on the Mountain at Silverlens Manila in 2021.