Fernando Casas
March 25, 1946 - May 28, 2026
“…art is, like Philosophy and science, an endeavor to understand who we are. I hold the view that the great works of art of human history show us, every time anew, who we are, where we are…”
Early Life and Education in Bolivia
Fernando Casas was born Fernando Rodriguez Casas in Cochabamba, Bolivia on March 25, 1946. From an early age, Casas displayed prodigious artistic talent. By the age of 13, he was a student of the renowned Luminist painter Raúl G. Prada. In 1964 he won his first National Award in painting, followed by a second National Award for drawing in 1968, a pivotal year that marked his departure from Bolivia.
Abstract 5, 1969
Duality - The Labyrinth of Self-Deception I, 1979
Merging Philosophy and Art
A LASPAU scholarship brought Casas to Colorado College, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.A. in Philosophy in 1970. He then received a fellowship to Rice University in Houston, earning his M.A. in 1972 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1978. During this period, the connection between art and philosophy became inextricably linked for Casas. He began an in-depth exploration of the intricacies of stereoscopic vision resulting in works such as “Spying on Oneself” (1979) and “Duality – The Labyrinth of Self-Deception I (1979).”
INNOVATIONS IN VISUAL REPRESENTATION
Faced with the limitations imposed by traditional linear perspective, Casas developed a system of visual representation, “Flat-Sphere Perspective,” that more accurately represents our visual experience. Rather than projecting towards one vanishing point deep in the horizon, Casas’ innovative perspective provides a view of every direction. The work “The Sky Noon” (1980) first illustrated the perceptual sphere that is congruent with our visual reality. The innovation of “Flat-Sphere Perspective” made evident to Casas that our visual reality is constrained by the fact that the eye is incapable of seeing the head that is attached to it. In “The Planet, Early Morning” (1980), Casas depicts the inconsistent or incomplete reality as we experience it: a blind spot that renders the visual field as necessarily incomplete.
The Planet, Early Morning, 1980
Flora, 1981
TIME AT THE CENTER OF REALITY
Casas went on to create a visual representation of space in time and/or time in space. The Polar Images obtained from his innovative Polar Perspective can be conceived as a sequence of spheres of vision that connect neighboring spheres by sharing the one point they have in common. A concentric Polar Image can also show- in a discontinuous fashion- the movement of perceived objects in space and time by making each flat sphere portray the object in a different location as the object changes its position in time. Casas’ painting “Flora” (1981) shows a woman depicted at two different points in time. In the surrounding flat sphere, the woman stands by a window with blooming trees. In the enclosed flat sphere, she walks into the adjacent room where a rocking chair awaits her. The painting allows the viewer to jump from one moment in time to another, visually crossing the border between one flat sphere which shows the woman in her immediate presence, and a second one that suggests the beginning of the end of her presence.
APPROACHING THE NEW MILLENNIUM
In the 90s, Casas began to incorporate ropes, knots, and springs as well as the use of fire for burning and smoking into pasted collages and painted collages, creating works that at times are fragmented from left to right or from top to bottom or split by wounds, fissures, and cracks. The works created during this time speak to sedimentation, strata, fossilization, paleontology, cultural and physical archeology, as well as the social conditions humans face. By 2009, as climate change became a major global issue, Casas’ embarked on a journey to capture the new understanding of nature and the growing consciousness of being part of a living planet earth in a series of works, depicting “nature at the very verge of her confines,” an expression that he borrowed from Shakespeare’s “King Lear”. Later on, Casas began inserting mirrors into some works, which allowed the viewer to see themself inside of the work and create a co-constitution between the artist and themself as they experience the work of art.
Cluster, 2002
Time at Play, 2024
Recent Focus: A Return to Drawing
Since his last exhibit in 2019, Casas has concentrated on drawing, a passion present since early childhood. Each of the drawings he has created over the last five years has been intentionally conceived to be as conceptually fascinating as possible with some of the pieces inviting you to “read” them from side to side, or up and down…as a time progression. Casas has also returned to drawing “significant books,” a theme that began decades earlier.
