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The SUNDAY EXPRESS-NEWS, San Antonio, August 21 1988 Page 7-H

Casas' art fulfills social obligation

Continued from 1-H

and look into a culture, and that's when marginality has its benefits."

Perhaps it is the belief in the timeless power of art that has allowed Casas to paint in relative obscurity for the past several years, accumulating more than 100 paintings in a warehouse while rarely having gallery shows. Now 58, Casas seems to feel the time is right to put his paintings before the public. While keeping a low profile, he created a rich cache of work that transgresses all sorts of borders - physical, emotional, semiotic, philosophical, religious and aesthetic.

On canvases as big as movie screens, Casas combines American pop art with Mexican colors. In the early 1970s, Casas was a leader of the Chicano artists' group Con Safo, which did touring multimedia shows for Cesar Chavez's farmworkers. But his work is not so overtly political now, although he continues to question society's values. With both visual and verbal puns, his paintings are filled with layers of meanings.

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. 

For example, in "Humanscape 70: Comic Whitewash," a gang of white, costumed, authoritarian superheroes come flying out of the symbolic frame to invade the dreams of young Chicano. "Kitchen Spanish" has a cartoon-like Mexican maid standing in front of a close-up of a modern kitchen sink, surrounded by a realistically-painted Anglo family. The implication is that in American culture, only Anglos are real and have power. Other works, such as "Brownies of the Southwest," "Show of Hands" and "Anatomy of a White Dog," also reflect the Chicano experience in American society.

Stereotyped images

In his most recent paintings, Casas has turned his attention to the stereotypes and symbols of the Southwest. With titles such as "S.W. Turf," "Pico de Gallo," "Guacamole" and "Pinatas," he uses cliches but reworks them into something new. Casas takes seriously the artist's responsibility to give people a new pair of eyes with which to look at the world. And if he can do it with a touch of humor, so much the better.

Not all of his best paintings will be making it to Austin, and several of his works remain on view in San Antonio at the Arte Moderno Gallery, 203 N. Presa St. One of the funniest is the "Bluebonnet Plague," which pokes fun at the regions most notorious genre of painting. "Southwestern Cliche," dominated by an enormous cow's skull, razzes the Santa Fe style made popular by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Casas paints in brilliant acrylic colors, which he applies in thick layers to achieve some of the texture and depth associated with oil paintings. Quick-drying and flatter than oil paints, acrylics are the colors of the 20th century, Casas said. He thinks most American art schools teach their students to dull their colors like English landscape painters, while his work reflects the rich Mediterranean tones that his ancestors brought across the Atlantic to the New World.

Growing up in El Paso's El Segundo barrio, Casas said he knew from age 5, as he sat on his back porch and watched the sunset, that he wanted to be an artist. He began by copying the calendar art of Manuel Helguera, the Mexican Norman Rockwell. After high school, though, he was drafted and spent time in Korea.

He worked for the railroad when he returned, and then decided to earn his BFA from Texas Western College in El Paso with the help of the GI Bill. He tried to continue his education at UT-Austin, but it did not have a painting program in the late 1950s, and Casas wound up crossing the border to earn his master's degree at the University of the Americas in Mexico City.

Beyond education

"The education that I got in my hometown was solid but very European. The closest it ever came to an American style of painting was abstract expressionism. But in Mexico, there was Rivera and Orozco, who were canceled out of my American art history classes because of their political beliefs," Casas said. "I think you go to school to learn your ABCs, but then you have to get beyond that and find your own style. Mexico exposed me to many new possibilities. Mexico City was an open, clean city then; not the monster it is now. I met many painters, poets and musicians; it was an exciting time."

He returned to El Paso and taught high school for a short time, then received an offer from San Antonio College, where he has been teaching for 27 years.

"When I first came to San Antonio, it seemed like an oppressed, colonial city. Everyone knew their place. 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," Casas said. "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 for an equal education and equal opportunities."

When he arrived in San Antonio, he was an abstract, non-objective painter, but he soon abandoned it when he realized that he would never be successful at expanding the parameters of abstract art. He felt his paintings had become too cerebral and decorative, too pretty. At a time when pop art was making headlines in New York, he returned to figurative art, influenced by Mexican graphic art and cartoons designed to reach a popular audience with provocative political statements.

"Abstract art became so dominant back in the 1960s that it virtually wiped out representational art. Then, when artists began to hunger for recognizable images again, they naturally turned to comic strips which were about the only thing left," Casas said. "I also did my first 6-by-8 foot canvas in about 1965-66. My idea was to blow-up the image, demonstrating how projected images sometimes seem more real than reality."

The San Pedro Drive-in probably inspired the huge size. Casas said he used to spend many nights at the now defunct drive-in, which functioned as a sort of informal community center. 

"It was also a place for sexual experience, there on the seat of your chariot with your girlfriend," he said. "My art also had a strong adherence to folk art, not so much in terms of its forms as its electricity, its instant connection with people. Formal artists can display great technical skill, but they often seem to have exhausted their creative spark." 

His involvement with Chavez and the farmworkers also had a dramatic impact, giving him the desire to paint that would be immediately accessible to all people. He was familiar with the conditions in the fields - the lack of sanitary facilities, poor housing, insecticides, extreme low wages and hardships on children.

"I feel strongly that art has a social obligation," Casas said. "Art should serve the needs of the people. Sometimes art is the only place where society can honestly examine its deepest needs and fears."

But parallel to his ambitions as an artist, Casas has also had a great deal of local influence as an educator. He has developed programs in architecture, fine arts, electronic graphics, jewelry design, production pottery and advertising at San Antonio College in a department with around 600 students.

His retrospective at the Laguna Gloria Art Museum may finally bring Casas the recognition he has so long deserved, but he appears to be a man comfortable with the decisions he has made over the course of his career. He may have spent most of his life crossing borders and breaking down barriers, but he remains convinced that the intermingling of different cultures will result in stronger, kinder and wiser hybrids. Regardless of whether he paints in Spanish or English, Casas has to be considered one of San Antonio's most articulate and important artists.

"Mel Casas" will remain on view through Oct. 16 at the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, 3809 W. 35th St. For more information, call 458-8191.