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to define the task he set for himself as an artist: to combine language and image in such a way that we might see more articulately and speak more imaginatively. 
Which brings us hard up against the first cultural border Mel Casas' art simply disregards: Thomas DeQuinccy's pervasive 19th-century romantic distinction between the art of "Knowledge" which teaches us and the art of "Power" which moves us. For Casas, art always wins to teach us and to move us simultaneously. As such, it is always political, at least in the classical sense. It aims to use "beauty" in the service of "truth" and "truth" in the service of the "good," and to define the "good" as an increase in general awareness on the part of the public at large. As an artist, Casas has no interest in "true" statements or "good" paintings as distinct from one another, not confused with one another, for that matter. It is a stance that renders standard art-language discussion of "style," "imagery," "metaphor," and "genre" inoperable and inconsequential, since it is the invisible linguistic substructure and cultural hierarchies of "style," "imagery," "metaphor," and "genre" which supply the actual content of the paintings whose subject is most often the ways life imitates art, usually to life's detriment. 

Having dispensed with these traditional beaux artes parameters of definition, what Casas give us in its place is format, a topographical, syntactical division of his 6' by 8' canvases, designed not to predicate but to subvert and deconstruct the hierarchal and metaphorical content of the words, images, and styles he employs. Each of the canvases after 1968 is composed

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