In Mouthful of Dirty Copper at Magenta Plains in New York, Rexy Tseng explores painting’s enduring role in an era dominated by AI-generated imagery, using material complexity to examine destruction, transformation, and human presence.
In an era where algorithmic systems flood visual culture with frictionless, simulated aesthetics, Tseng’s work insists on the material weight of painting—its capacity to hold time, gesture, and the specificity of human touch. His compositions, often constructed from aerial perspectives, navigate the tension between structural coherence and the precarious instability of collapse, positioning destruction not as spectacle but as a process of slow, inevitable transformation.
Resonances with painters such as Luc Tuymans, Francis Bacon, and Chaim Soutine emerge in Tseng’s atmospheric, psychologically charged spaces, yet his work is undeniably of this moment. Where AI-generated imagery tends toward homogeneity and an uncanny smoothness, Tseng’s paintings revel in material friction: a warped metal roof, the splintering of wood, the crushed geometry of fallen structures. His attention to the particular behaviors of materials—how they respond to stress, erosion, and decay—renders his paintings neither wholly documentary nor entirely abstract but something in between, embodying a visual logic that is both analytical and affective.
The muted, earth-toned palette, punctuated with restrained yet striking blues and oranges, reinforces a sense of quiet entropy rather than dramatic devastation. His paint handling shifts fluidly between loose washes and thickly worked passages, creating a layered sense of time—both in the depicted ruins and in the making of the painting itself. These surfaces do not function as instantaneous snapshots but as records of accumulated decisions, mirroring the slow degradation of the landscapes they depict. The spatial ambiguity that runs through his canvases, where forms waver between recognition and dissolution, compels viewers to navigate an environment that is as psychologically charged as it is physically unstable.
With Mouthful of Dirty Copper, Tseng articulates the stakes of painting today—not in opposition to digital culture but as an assertion of its unique role. Where algorithmic images flatten vision into seamless, optimized simulations, Tseng’s paintings hold contradiction, friction, and embodied thought. His work does not merely illustrate destruction but situates us within the fragile structures we inhabit, making visible the quiet precarity of our time. In doing so, Tseng affirms why painting persists: not as an anachronism but as an irreplaceable means of engaging with the complexities of the world.
