Chris Cascio Again
I’ve been a fan of artist Chris Cascio for well over a decade. I think I first saw his work at a small exhibit at Pablo Cardoza’s gallery. I was introduced to Cascio, who was then at getting his MFA. I bought a painting from him, out of his cramped studio at UH. Those works took supercrappy ads from old musical equipment magazines and blew them up. They appealed to me because his subject seemed to magically encapsulate a kind of dumb teenage male obsession—being a rock star with lots of fancy equipment. That was kind of the fantasy those magazines offerred.
His work after he got his MFA continued in a similar vein, mining old magazines for low-culture raw material. escecially old classified ads from High Times, various nudie mags, etc. If you think of Pop art as using ordinary middle-brow culture as its raw material, Cascio would draw his subject matter from culture that seemed utterly stoopid.
His work continued evolving. It started seeming like he had gotten all that adolescent trash culture out of his system. But his current body of work is still all sbout collage. Instead of collaging weird old swingers’ ads, he is collaging old clothing bits. A little bit like Gabriel Martinez, Cascio is producing quilts.
He has 100 pieces hanging up at Ruth Street Projects (the house gallery that is what Civic TV evolved into). This show is called Stacks on Stacks on Stacks, presumably because there are literal stacks of paintngs. There is a great photo on the Ruth Street Instagram page of stacks of these paintings in boxes ready to move.) Every one of them is 11” by 9”, and seeing all 100 at one time is overwhelming. Cascio has gone around asking friends to donate old clothes (I gave him a garbage bag full of old t-shirts, made redundant due to my losing 90 lbs) which he cuts up and uses as his raw material. In many of them, Cascio is using some image that was printed on the cloth as part of the content of the image in any given piece, but in many cases, the cloth is simply a solid color, and his artistic choices have to do with the shapes he creates out of any given piece of fabric, and the contrasting colors.
So a certain percentge of the pieces, like the four above, come off as jaunty geometric abstranctions. Perhaps because I am in the middle of reading The Slip, I am getting Jack Youngerman vibes off of some of these.
But a lot of them involve taking whatever was on the cloth to begin with and using it as part of the content of a given picture.
The piece entitled Indigenous Pooch uses one of the t-shirts I gave Cascio as part of its media.
The vibrating colors of Pepsi Co, combined with the edges between swaths, give this one real appeal to me. But it feels weird to praise this one in particular. All 100 of them have a similar kind of appeal, a kind of plesaure that rewards close observation.
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Been watching these pieces by Chris for a while. Outstanding work and outstanding review.