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Mel Casas
September 3 - October 16, 1988

Working on a large scale reminiscent of the Mexican muralist, San Antonio artist Mel Casas had created, over a period of approximately twenty-five years, stunningly beautiful and sophisticated didactic paintings which politicize American cultural reality in a fresh and startling way. However, there has been no substantial examination of Casas' paintings or of his direction as an artist since 1976. Mel Casas, a special retrospective exhibition organized by Laguna Gloria Art Museum which opens September 3 and continues through October 16, 1988, will introduce to Texas the paintings of this artist and educator, who is considered to be a precursor of the Chicano art movement, but whose work is not widely known or seen.

In the early 1960s, Casas, a devotee of abstract painting, abandoned it to create realistic work influenced by pop art. As part of the new direction, he began to challenge the myths and icons of popular American culture, His realistic work, spanning the years from 1865 to the present, has been dominated by a single series which Casas refers to as a Humanscapes. As landscapes portray select views of natural scenery, so the Humanscapes show scenes of contemporary culture. Through his paintings Casas makes forceful and complex observations about our culture and the experiences of Chicanos within it. 

Brilliantly colored and bold, the initial Humanscapes present politically charged images which focus upon American consumerism -- woman, or sex, as commodity -- and violence. Casas' messages are partly spelled out at the bottom of each painting and set off a double-entendre with the images above. The images themselves are also visually double; larger figures appear above and behind smaller ones -- like a screen image within the image -- protecting, contradicting or elaborating and creating jarring shifts in space and scale.

From 1970 on, his paintings touch upon the problems afflicting various sectors of American society, often Mexican-American and Native American. For example, the sardonic painting, Kitchen Spanish, introduces a cartoon-like Mexican maid standing before a close-up of a modern kitchen sink, surrounded by a realistically painted Anglo family. In this world, the painting seems to say, only the Anglos are real and have power. Brownies of the Southwest, Show of Hands, Anatomy of a White Dog, Kitchen Spanish, and Comic Whitewash are all part of a body of work