Twelve Days of Texas

"Mel Casas' neatly painted surfaces are more stringent, but his subject matter is often just as potent as Jimenez's. His paintings touch on the problems afflicting various sectors of American life, often Mexican and Indian. Like Jimenez, Casas is Chicano. Casas' messages are partly spelled out at the bottom of his paintings 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 them and creating jarring shifts in space and scale." - Roberta Smith