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Casas returns meaning to cultural stereotypes
by Patricia C. Johnson Art Review
Houston Chronicle

Using bold shapes and color, Mel Casas turns cliches inside out and upside down, transforming cultural stereotypes into bittersweet visual puns.
Consider the image of a Mexican sleeping under a cactus. Like an Aunt Jemima figure, it tells more about Anglo eyes than it does about the culture it's supposed to represent. Casas uses that image in countless ways, lifting it from the gewgaws of the tourist market to give it fresh punch.
In the painting titled Mexican Plate, for example, everyone in the Southwest knows the title means cheap Mexican food. It also can be an object from the curio market, its origin unmistakable if it bears a figure in a sombrero, head bent in slumber, and a serape covering the shoulders. Indeed, this painting suggests the siesta after the meal so clearly written in paint on its lower edge: tacos, tortillas, frijoles.
Born in El Paso in 1929, Melesio Casas, like sculptor Luis Jimenez, used his artistic prowess to criticize racism during the 1960s and explore Chicano culture in the following decade. Today both artists, though not exactly mellowed, have tempered the radical look of their art without forfeiting their commitment to pierce the Eurocentric mainstream and broaden its cultural references.
Casas' 27 recent (1984-89) acrylics on view at the Galveston Arts Center and Ir-Rational Art and Design in Houston, continue the "Humanscapes" series he began in 1965.
His format is a drive-in movie screen, or perhaps a billboard, bordered with decorative elements and careful labels. His subjects are ideas and symbols that have been robbed of meaning. His paintings attempt to restore the meaning. Where the earlier pictures were socially militant, the recent images are both funny and poignant double-entendres.
Self-depecrating humor belongs to people secure in themselves, and Casas directs his not just at himself and Chicanos, but at the Southwest in general. The arrogant, brightly colored rooster of Mexican fiestas becomes a stand-in for revolutionary Chicanos in John Handcock (Galveston). With its beak open in pronouncement, and its brightly red topknot, its primary yellow eye flares with the excitement of a local politician.
Texas T'ang (Galveston) celebrates the horse, a revered symbol of the fiercely independent cowboy. But the horse also happens to be almost synonymous with another, diametrically opposite culture. In the refined court of the 7th-10th century T'ang Dynasty of China, celebrated horsemen and horsewomen were immortalized in exquisite, fragile porcelains.

See CASAS on Page 6D. 

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Mel Casas' Juan Handcock transforms a fiesta rooster into a symbol for revolutionary chicanos.

Transcription Notes:
I edited this transcript and I wasnt sure if the writing under the image was supposed to be included.