The idea started when Gabby Prado’s then-professor, the late Leo Abaya, suggested the idea of black and whites during her class. He asked how she can relate the “absence” of color and brightness with her personal narrative. And that while her sounds are seen as colors, how can she portray “existence” in a space where it is unrecognizable?
Throughout her body of work, Prado has never left out a hue. She takes these momentary swathes and daubs as her connections with the hearing world—a splash of orange, the staccato of pastels, or a symphony of warm tones. Now in “After the Loudness Left”, Prado, a synesthetic, portrays this world without her hearing aid. Her canvases move in shades of black, gray, and white, but not as a subtraction of color, rather as a form of recalibration. By stripping away the chromatic spectrum, she allows texture, mark, and gesture to come forward with heightened resonance. A thick black form does not merely sit heavy against the white ground; it pulses with the residue of something unsaid, a narrative absorbed rather than spoken. Scribbles and scratches, like shorthand notes of an indistinguishable conversation, suggest the persistence of communication even when the words themselves have been muffled.
Prado highlights that the lack of color is not an automatic nod to silence, rather a confirmation of another area of her life she rarely visits but ostensibly learns from and is still a part of.
