In a profile of journalist Tony Schwartz by Jane Mayer in a July issue of the New Yorker, Schwartz recounted his coining of the phrase “truthful hyperbole” when he ghostwrote Donald Trump’s 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal. “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” he wrote in Trump’s voice at the time. “I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and it’s a very effective form of promotion.” Artist David Opdyke has taken this phrase, with its inherent contradiction, as the title of his current show at Magnan Metz.
Opdyke, who has critiqued US culture and politics since his early career — through tongue-in-cheek sculptures and drawings that suggest a societal decay driven by squabbles over guns, oil, and other material possessions — continues in this vein. In the present show he has taken scores of vintage postcards and intervened with gouache and ink, altering each image in a way that completely changes its meaning. Most of these cards depict well known buildings, monuments, or historic sites. As propaganda, they are determinedly cheerful, their rosy or sepia tones and earnest vernacular meant to invoke that particular swell of American patriotism that believes in the nation’s perpetual innocence and wide-eyed enthusiasm. Opdyke seizes upon this pictorial language and turns it on its head.
