Viewing page 31 of 43
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
4H Sunday, July 4, 1993 San Antonio Express-News Casas work, large and small, included in exhibit at UTSA Art Watch By Dan R. Goddard Express-News Arts Writer One of the founding members of Con Safo, an influence on a couple of generations of Chicano artists while teaching for 30 years at San Antonio College, Mel Casas has spent his long career exploring the invisible borders that divide us by age, race, political and religious beliefs. As part of the Contemporary Art Month, Casas has a one-man show at the University of Texas at San Antonio gallery through July 30 featuring several of his 8-by-6-foot "Humanscapes," along with small, square paintings suggested by his retirement in Italy since 1990. Two of Casas' "Humanscapes" are included in "Chicago Art: Resistance and Affirmation" at the San Antonio Museum of Art. The "S.W. Mural" features the initials of Con Safo, while "Brownies of the Southwest" seeks the connection between Girl Scouts, Indians, and a tasty dessert. Casas had accumulated more than 200 paintings in a San Antonio warehouse, which gallery director Ron Boling culled through for about two dozen in this exhibit. Casas had a show at the Jansen-Perez Gallery in 1991, but the UTSA show is his biggest since his retrospective at Austin's Laguna Gloria Museum in 1988. On canvases as big as multiplex movie screens, Casas combines American pop art with Mexican colors, often combining English words with Spanish images, or vice versa, for painting that are a hybrid of Anglo and Chicano influences, As a leader of the local Chicano artists group Con Safo in the 1970s, which did touring multimedia shows for Cesar Chavez's farmworkers, Casas developed a finely honed social consciousness that he combines with a suave, sophisticated technique using bright, creamy acrylic paints. Stenciled titles are usually an important part of his compositions, contained in a thick black border at the bottom of each canvas that define the painting as a "sign" filled with potent symbols. Above the border is often a shallow pictorial space filled with images and patterns from the real world. Projecting out from this ground is a large, rectangular screen usually filled with images from the realm of metaphor. In semiotic terms, each painting is broken down into graphic, phenomenal and categorical signs. In "S.W. Cliche" for example, a giant skull dwarfs a cactus-studded landscape in a subtle dig t the Santa Fe artists. "God's Country" makes you wonder what kind of Higher Power would create a place so prickly as South Texas, symbolized with a skull, cactus and jalapenos. Not as political as his Con Safo days, some of his later works deal with food, including popcorn and pico de gallo. In his smaller works, Casas mellows even more, recording the beauty of the Italian landscape and seashells, though he can't quite forget the past, labeling a portrait of a fierce German soldier "Mythomania." His colors have become darer and more somber, but his titles still ripple with witty wordplay. Casas grew up in El Paso's Segundo barrio and, after graduating from high school, he was drafted and served in Korea. He used the G.I. Bill to study art at Texas Western College in El Paso, going on to earn a master's degree at the University of the Americas in Mexico City. When he arrived in San Antonio in the 1960s, he was an abstract, non-objective painter, but he changed with the advent of pop art, returning to a figurative style influenced by Mexican graphic art and cartoons. In a 1988 interview, Casas noted, "In the Southwest, art is important, and artists have to adjust to that marginality. But art also has tremendous symbolic power. Art must constantly be putting society's values on the table for evaluation. But people who are happy with the status quo are very sensitive to any criticism. The artist must learn to stand aside and look into a culture, and that's when marginality has its benefits. "When I first came to San Antonio, it seemed like an oppressed, colonial city. Everyone knew their pace. Either you conformed to the status quo, or you were treated like an alien. The Hispanic population seemed remarkably docile to me after growing up in El Paso, where there was more openness about relations. But things have changed. Chicanos became aware of their rights. Now, people are hungry for the things the rest of the American population has. They have learned to demand their rights." The Mel Casas exhibit runs through July 30 at the University of Texas at San Antonio gallery, 691-4391. Summer hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 10-11 a.m. Fridays, 2-4 p.m. Sundays. Admission is free. [[image - Painting]] 'S.W. Cliche,' by Mel Casas, is a subtle dig at Santa Fe artists. Work by the influential former San Antonio artist is exhibited at the University of Texas at San Antonio as part of Contemporary Art Month.
