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and swiftly dismantles the comic impotence of abstract art in a series of paintings like Humanscape 108: Surely a Collectable, in which the startling irrelevance of the endeavor is starling dramatized by the total depopulation of the frontal pictorial space.
What is most amazing is about all of these efforts at subversion and deconstruction is that Casas, the artist, indulges in none of the masochistic visual self-denial, or self-conscious ugliness [[strikethrough]] which is [[/strikethrough]] so characteristic of the contemporary efforts in these areas. There is a charming impudence in his perfect willingness to have his cake and deconstruct it too. He seems delighted, in fact, to indulge himself in the voluptuousness of the "American Beauty," in the pop dazzle of the "Comic Whitewash," in the faux grandeur of the political rhetoric and the tasteful wash-and-spatter vocabulary of abstract painting, as if to say, "where is the authority in criticizing something you can't do?" In the process he has made a lot of good pictures and good paintings in the service of the public good. 

And, finally, in his latest paintings, having cleared the field of proletarian low-art imagery, mid-cult political imagery and elitist high-art imagery. Casas accepts the challenge to fill the symbolic space he has so shrewdly vacuumed out over the years with his own rambunctious, homegrown, street-wise cultural iconography. From the glamourous paper animals of "Humanscape 138: Piñatas to the vicious avocado of Humanscape 132: Guacamole with its ominous tostadas protruding like lurking chicano sharks, to the lively, scungy street-pooch of Humanscape: 141: Barrio Dog" with its feral grin and his bilingual bark, these images benignly

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