David Opdyke’s murals composed of hand-painted vintage postcards play with scale in smart, seductive ways. Using the postcards as though they were mosaic tiles, each loosely gridded mural presents an inventive bird’s-eye vantage of varied terrain—from mountainous landscapes, to dense urban developments, to blue expanses of ocean. These sweeping vistas would appear charming if it weren’t for their discordant details: tornadoes and wildfires that menace the land- and cityscapes or bungee cords that stretch across the ocean as if trying to hold the earth together against climate change. The murals’ larger shapes, which sometimes break from the grid format, likewise suggest dissolution. Opdyke achieves these compositional effects not only through clever juxtapositions of the postcards’ imagery but also through painting surrealist scenes upon that imagery. With dark humor and engrossing minutiae, his murals provide perspective on a planetwide crisis that, in its pervasiveness, can make it hard for us humans to see the forest for the trees and vice versa.
—Louis Bury
