herman de vries’ tautologische postkarten

Usually a postcard highlights something special. You share with your family how very whimsical it is that that tower of Pisa can stand so askew, or how blue the Mediterranean Sea is. The simultaneously sent postcards depicted here seem to have a similar intention. The special object is depicted rather ordinarily. Only the text on the front makes one frown briefly: ‘the castle as castle’, herman de vries writes, and that seems a duplication. But with it he inserts a subtle shift in meaning. That singular beautiful castle becomes just a castle, like there are many more.
In the case of the postcard of the king the intervention of the artist works slightly differently. For this portrait a man is dressed up in the most expensive clothes and with a heroic pose captured in paint. The individual made special as a kind of noble superman. But if we see this king as king, he becomes common again. A bit cliché even, that mantle with its lining of mink fur.