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populace at large is called to account just as readily in paintings like HUmanscape 77: Temporary Loss of Image in which the symbolic screen has gone black and the herd of sheep crossing before it, in the absence of cultural authority, have lost their images as well, existing only as transparent profiles in the vacuum. 
In the final analysis, however, the quality, their most distinguishes Mel Casas as a man and an artist for me, is neither his artistic acuity, nor his intellectual subtlety, nor the trenchancy of his critique of contemporary culture. Nor is it even his longtime commitment to a category of artistic activity an artistic strategy only recently become fashionable. Finally, for me at least, it is the courage and high spirits with which he has accepted he rather demoralizing conclusions and daunting challenges posed by his own insights into the nature of culture, language and he artistic endeavor. 
Looking back, as I have been, over twenty years of largely unrecognized and unrewarded creative work, what skirts me most immediately is not the despair or the anger (although they are there, in spades), but the dazzling vitality, the visual elegance, and thoroughgoing good-heartedness of the spectacle, its systematic acceptance of its own challenges. The work [[scratched out/ which [[/scratchet out]] there begins in the 60s with a critique of the virulence of the popular culture readily accepts the challenge to provide real political imagery in the Farmworker paintings, and having bid farewell to the idiom (with the shadowy "Shanghai gesture" superimposed on Humanscape 63: Show of Hands), he proceeds to its alternative 

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