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- 24-11-2022 (2)
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Abstract
Using Rodolfo Paras-Perez’s print practice and scholarship, this essay illustrates how the notion of the kiss came to be the artistic and transmissive device for the woodcut’s revival in Manila. Reflecting on the trope of the kiss in its capacity to operate pictorial lineage, two woodcut works by Paras-Perez (Kiss, 1962 and Florante at Laura, 1977) are foregrounded, alongside the artist’s milieus and influences, to highlight an interchange spanning Europe, the United States, Mexico, and the Philippines. While both woodcut and kiss first arrived through colonial contact, they later served as agents of a postwar modernism in Philippine graphic arts, enlivening and disrupting its genealogy.
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