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Page 4 RiverCity Review September [1988]

Art

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MEL CASAS 
San Antonio Artist and Teacher Creates a Stir With First Major Area Exhibition

Working on a large scale reminiscent of Mexican muralists, San Antonio artist Mel Casas has created, over a period of approximately twenty-five years, stunningly beautiful and sophisticated didactic paintings that politicize American cultural reality in fresh and startling ways. However, there has been no substantial examination of Casas' paintings or of his direction as an artist since 1976. Mel Casas, a special retrospective exhibition of Casas' paintings or of his direction as an artist since 1976. Mel Casas, a special retrospective exhibition organized by Laguna Gloria Art Museum, which opens September 3 and continues through October 16, 1988, will introduce to Texas the paintings of this artist and educator, who is considered to be a precursor of the Chicano art movement, but whose work is not widely known or seen.

In the early 1960s Casas, a devotee of abstract painting, abandoned it to create realistic work influenced by pop art. As part of the new direction, he began to challenge the myths and icons of popular American culture. His realistic work, spanning the years from 1965 to the present, has been dominated by a single series Casas refers to as Humanscapes. As landscapes portray select views of natural scenery, so Humanscapes show us scenes of contemporary culture. Through his paintings Casas makes forceful and complex observations about our culture and the experience of Chicanos within it. 

Brilliantly colored and bold, the initial Humanscapes present politically charged images that focus upon American consumerism-woman, or sex, as commodity-violence. Casas' messages are partly spelled out at the bottom of each painting and set off a double-entendre with the images above. The images themselves are also visually double: larger figures appear above and behind smaller ones--like a screen image within the image-- protecting, contradicting or elaborating and creating jarring shifts in space and scale. 

From 1970 on, his paintings touch upon problems afflicting various sectors of American society, often Mexican-American and Native American. For example, the sardonic painting, Kitchen Spanish, introduces a cartoon-like Mexican maid standing before a close-up of a modern kitchen sink, surrounded by a realistically painted Anglo family. In this world, the painting seems to say, only Anglos are real and have power. Kitchen Spanish, Brownies of the Southwest, Show of Hands, Anatomy of a White Dog and Comic Whitewash are part of a body of work that champions growing Chicano pride and focuses attention upon inequities in our society.

As even-handed satirist, Casas next turns his wit to the art world, poking playfully at the intent of abstract expressionism or pop art, decrying the commercialization of the art object. And most recently, the culture of the Southwest with its stereotypes and symbols--the landscape, the food, objects of costume and traditional-fall prey to his brush. 

Born in El Segundo barrio in el Paso, Casas received degrees from Texas Western College in El Paso and the University of the Americas in Mexico. Since 1961 he has taught at San Antonio College where he has been Chairman of the Art Department for the past ten years. Artistically and philosophically Casas has exerted a strong influence on young Chicanos who have worked to forge their own artistic consciousness. Of Casas himself, the power and breadth of his paintings make it difficult to neatly categorize the artist. He continues to follow his own dictates as social critic and social conscience, never indifferent, painting with strength, beauty, and conviction the injustices and hypocrisies that surround us all.

This exhibition has been made possible by a generous grant from American Telegraph and Telephone. There will be related programs in conjunction with the exhibition and a catalogue and poster will be available in the Museum Store. 

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Mel Casas, "Humanscapes 70: Comic Whitewash", 1973