Villalongo is most recognizable from his cut outs from black velour paper. Regarding his work at Graphicstudio, Villalongo explains, “Palimpsest combines silkscreen, puff ink, aquatint and laser cut. The texture of the background is layers of silkscreened ink and puff ink. The plates were made by rubbing asphalt road, sidewalks and manhole covers with crayon onto mylar. I wanted the print to invert the ground to the wall. This becomes the background for two bodies floating through an image of hoodies. These rather banal garments have become a foil to suggest potential violence when worn on black bodies and in recent times a symbol of protest to that mindset. The two prints Palimpsest and Embodied suggest the longer trajectory of this racial imaginary that has been going on far longer than our current moment often ending in violence. However, our current cultural discourse speculates on these patterns of problematic reasoning and actions as debatable despite an overwhelming record. Palimpsest is about that record and the abstraction that develops around black lives as a result of this cycle of violence, protest and erasure. I want to suggest the body as an abstraction, one of resiliency and flux that rewrites itself as it moves through the world. One that embraces visibility and invisibility as a condition of being.”

Courtesy of Graphicstudio/USF