Mel Casas

"[6] It has been argued that, given the broad range of his subject matter, Casas should "also be regarded as a major American artist.

[13][14] Casas, who served as president of the Con Safo art group (1971–73), was a well known teacher, writer, theorist, and public intellectual whose business card listed him as a "cultural adjuster.

[17] Regarded nationally as one of the foundational figures of Chicano Art,[18] Casas has also been called "the most influential of those artists who spent their careers in Texas during the second half of the twentieth century.

[20] After graduating from high school in 1948,[4] Casas worked for Pacific Fruit Express, a railroad company, as an iceman, and he helped with his father's Swedish massage business located in downtown El Paso.

[18] Casas taught art at Jefferson High School in El Paso, Texas for three years, where one of his students was Gaspar Enriquez.

Con Safo is a Pachuco slang expression whose most common meanings are: "the same to you," "don't mess with this," and "forbidden to touch.

[15] Other notable artists who subsequently joined the group include Rudy Treviño (who subsequently served as the group's last president), Santos Martínez, César Martínez, Amado Peña, Jr., Carmen Lomas Garza, Kathy Vargas, Roberto Gonzalez, and Rolando Briseño.

[12] Casas was first recognized for his work in an abstract expressionist style,[4] the "typical," dominant mode of painting in this period in the United States.

[20] Casas, it is said, also believed that "artists shouldn't merely imitate subject matter or painterly styles emanating from Europe or New York.

[14][31][4][32][6] "I so divide the picture plane of my paintings so as to force the spectator into the role of ‘voyeur’ thus acquiring an identity through participation.

[6] But, of the approximately 800 art works Casas created, "only a handful treat Chicano subjects, and of these, even fewer feature recognizable stereotypical images.

"[6] As one critic noted, "Though he was loath to adhere to any single artistic perspective, he is credited with infusing the Chicano art movement with sharp wit and intellectualism, invigorating (and inciting) his peers and empowering his successors to do the same.

[35][36][33][1][37] Critic Dan Goddard called the exhibitions "a spectacular multi-exhibit tribute tracing almost the entire progression of Casas' 150 Humanscape paintings from 1965 to 1989.

[14] Prior to his 150 numbered Humanscapes, Casas made three black-and-white paintings (labeled A, B, and C) in 1965 that the artist retrospectively included in the series.

According to the curator, Casas' ideas "had to gestate before he found the inspiration to focus on cinema and spectatorship as explicit, extended subjects.

"[38] In the first group, from 1965 through 1967, Casas made depictions of audience members watching films at drive-in cinemas and conventional movie theaters, characterized as "psychologically intense, somewhat blurry dreamscapes.

The exhibition culminated in Humanscape 50 (Bare Baby Brick, 1968), described as "a Pop masterpiece from the Sexual Revolution period" whose enormous red lipstick was Casas at "his most Freudian.

The aim of the exhibition of political paintings at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in 2015 was to provide "a more complete picture of Casas' far-ranging and probing intellect, his caustic wit, playful and ironic sense of humor, and the complexity and open-endedness with which he addressed social issues in the 1960s and 1970s.

"[33] Commencing with Humanscape 74 (Deux Champ Stripped Bare by his Art, 1975), "a punning, multilingual reference to Marcel Duchamp... Casas sometimes takes another artist’s style out for a spin," including Lichtenstein, Matisse, and Pollock.

He utilized jars, squeeze bottles, barbecue skewers, and chopsticks (the latter two implements were also used to manipulate paint once it was on the canvas).

[14][41][25] The Humanscape paintings address various issues, including spectatorship and mass media, war, the sexual revolution, Nixon-era politics, gun violence in the U.S., assassinations, the objectification of women, art movements and fashions, and Southwestern clichés.

"[25] Inspired by Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), Casas was concerned that media, such as television, film, and advertising had incredible power to manipulate people, often unconsciously through erotic subjects.

[14][13] This structure generated verbal/visual puns, and multiple entendres, enabling Casas to utilize his deep knowledge of Romance languages, including slang and connotations and denotations.

[14] The texts chosen as subtitles for the Humanscapes served to create what the artist called "conundrums," meant to provoke the viewer to question and re-interpret the images to which they are juxtaposed.

They are characterized as "mostly small drip paintings," and while some of them "treat social issues, the vast majority are semi-nude females, still lifes, and fetishistic images of women’s shoes.

A number of these relatively small post-Humanscape paintings are reproduced in Mel Casas: Artist as Cultural Adjuster.

[44] and American History Does not Begin with the White Man: Indigenous Themes in the Work of Mel Casas.

The Memorial exhibition featured a survey of small paintings, as well as what was billed as "the largest showing of the Humanscapes in more than twenty years.

"Getting the Big Picture: Political Themes in the Humanscapes of Mel Casas," in Sorell, V. A., and Scott L. Baugh, eds.

American History Does not Begin with the White Man: Indigenous Themes in the Work of Mel Casas.