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DATOS BIOGRAFICOS 

MEL CASAS

Nació en Noviembre 24 de 1929 en El Paso, Texas.
Edad: 39 años, casado, 4 hijos.
Residencia actual:  702 Inspiration Drive, San Antonio, Texas.
Educación:
El Paso High School - 1948.
Texas Western College, El Paso, Texas. 
Universidad de las Américas, México, D.F. 
9 años de dar clases de Pintura en San Antonio.
College. San Antonio, Texas.



ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Our American culture at the moment is going through the pains of a growing matriarchy. Nowhere is it more evident than in the imagery of the cinema and televisión. 

In my paintings which I entitled Humanscape, I use the black of the movie house (anonymity) and the persistence of vision (the projected image) to probe into the most compulsive mysteries of its effects.  

I so divide the picture plane of my painting formats so as to force the spectator into the role of "voyeur" thus acquiring an identity through participation. The effect is a kind of sacred conversation, an invitation to participate in what could be a pornographic phantasy. It is too difficult a task to witness and not react to the transformation of an audience from one world to another subliminally and without critical awareness. That's the reason the audience in my paintings acts as somnambulistic actors in a video space environment that projects sex-anxiety as a protection against nonbeing. Gone is the search for personal reality, and instead there is a collective reality. 

Indoctrination through the use of the projected image can be salvation, or catastrophe. It is the trend of our time. The anxiety of our complicated, fragmentized knowledge makes itself evident in our overemphasized sexuality. Sexuality tends to connote knowledge, ergo, equality. How man handles his sexual drives will invariably affect his creative impulses and color his approach to society, religion and politics. The use of erotic images is an attempt to convey a transcendental experience. This erotomania manifest a patriarchal and matriarchal struggle. The cinema and the television commercial are figurative evidence of our transition from patrism to matrism. Where the former is restrictive, conservative, ascetic, the latter is permissive, progressive, hedonistic.

The fantasy machine projects a world of external calm and interior crisis. The audience looks at a situation and is simultaneously in it and living it. It makes knowledgeable automatons of its willing audience offering them a kaleidoscope of life in techniques of mass coerción-mass seduction. The result is a willing menticide. The cinematic environment isolates and depersonalizes the audience, reduces them to an anxious pause charged with a visual question. Hypnotized, they infer a given moment in time without relation to any other, a suggestion of arbitrarily juxtaposed time sequences which heighten the sense of dislocation and the moment of anticipation.