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MEL CASAS: PAINTING AS IDEA

   Melesio (Mel) Casas, 45, is a Mexican-American artist living in San Antonio, Texas.  Mr. Casas was born and reared in El Paso, Texas.  He has receive a B.A. from Texas Western College and an M.F.A. at the University of the Americas in Mexico City, Mexico.  Mr. Casas taught in El Paso for three years.  Presently, he is Associate Professor of Art at San Antonio College, where he has been teaching for the past thirteen years.  His work has been exhibited at the Witte Museum in San Antonio and the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston and the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as at other museums and galleries.
   Mel Casas places the major emphasis on his work on the idea and the symbolism in painting.  In this respect, he is like Michelangelo, who felt that the sculpting of the human body was important as "a total expression of the Idea, so that the human figure serves . . . as the concrete realization of an intense feeling."1 Of course, the ideas that have prompted Casas' paintings are quite different from those that motivated Michelangelo.
   Casas is living in a time and place radically dissimilar to that of Michelangelo.  This difference can be seen primarily in Casas' choice of subject matter.  Mel Casas'

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