Rexy Tseng’s Mouthful of Dirty Copper, his first exhibition in New York, now on view at Magenta Plains from January 16 – March 1, 2025, is a concise series of seven paintings, all portraying cataclysmic disasters—like car accidents, mudslides, plane crashes—from a bird’s eye view. Painted with a soft, muted palette, each work renders catastrophe with a careful precision of brushwork, with Tseng’s attentive strokes drawing the viewer into his mostly large-scale art. The largest here is Scares and Pores (2024), which presents an asphalt road and steel posts severed and mangled by mud in various shades of skin tones. An idyllic blue sky presides above this calamity, with colour, shape and linework incongruent with the haphazardness of destruction pictured. This coalescence of the formal, the pictorial and the somatic is the strength of Tseng’s work, which ultimately parses the ambiguities and ambivalences of images—from news media or art history alike—in the 21st century.

A reverence for recent art history and the medium of painting extends throughout the exhibition. Tseng’s debt and esteem for painters like Luc Tuymans (b.1958) is evident in both his palette and perspective. But more canny is his formal and thematic relationship with 19th-century landscape painters like Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840), 20th-century Expressionists like Chaïm Soutine (1893 – 1943), or even Pop artists like Wayne Thiebaud (1920 – 2021). Tseng uses an omnipresent aerial perspective with brushy strokes of paint applied in expansive passages of colour, with formal elements that emphasise the independence between artist, subject and viewer, as well as the materiality and essential objectness of painting.

For instance, Open Wound (2024) legibly riffs on Soutine’s renderings of meat, with the pinks, browns, blacks and yellows of Tseng’s central mudslide a textural, fleshy swath of thick paint consuming most of the composition. That Tseng includes abstracted debris (largely white or blue-ish hunks lost in the sweep of sienna) further entices us to study the materiality of the paint, just as Soutine’s inclusion of elements from life, such as rope, bowls or fruit troubles the balance between abstraction and figuration in his rendition of meats. Tseng’s insistence on the materiality of paint, as well as a documentary impulse that ambiguously questions artificiality, is obliquely reminiscent of Thiebaud’s cakes and candies or, more directly, later works like Canyon Mountains (2011 – 2012). Likewise, Tseng’s almost crisp delineation of red, blue and white houses along the horizon line of Open Wound recalls Fredrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), in which we see a single figure looking outwards at the horizon of a turbulent seascape. Like Fredrich, Tseng is concerned with the relationship between humans and nature and how each affects the other; like many modern and contemporary painters, he is assiduous in dissecting the truth or falsity of images. In this pursuit of tracing the distortion of veracity and specificity, he stresses the thingness of painting in his play with texture and brushwork or the size and scale of his canvases.

Despite omitting the human figure in these seven paintings, Tseng nevertheless emphasises a somatic experience of images. Throughout these paintings, the body is referenced in titles and forms (a stomach or heart-like shape in the centre of Scares and Pores, the fleshy feel of Open Wound), and the show comprehensively stresses a bodily experience. Visitors either descend a narrow staircase or take a sterile steel elevator to see the exhibition within Magenta Plains’s lower gallery space, imparting a feeling of depth. This contrasts with the aerial perspective that Tseng uses, destabilising the viewer, while simultaneously reinforcing their physical relationship to these works in particular and images in general. All of the forms here originate from news media and are thus transcriptions of real-life events that some visitors to Mouthful of Dirty Copper may have already seen or be familiar with.

Indeed, there’s nothing inherently specific to place or incident in these works, as the jackknifed trucks, splintered houses or flames of a plane’s explosion could (tragically) be any place from any recent time. But that these scenes seem so familiar or even ubiquitous further imposes a feeling of distance and distortion, as we feel both removed and involved in the devastation they depict. These images feel current but almost timeless, as they could be from any time in the last few decades. Shouldn’t we be able to place the disasters? What if that were our flooded house or neighbourhood pictured in Wet Walls (2024) or Whimper (2024)? Or our car or truck in Return to Senders (2024)? What have we done to stave off such destruction from nature? How are we indirectly implicated through our carbon footprints as we participate in the industrial complex? Sadly, the exhibition’s timing amidst fatal wildfires in LA and in-flight accidents on the East Coast make this exhibition all the more topical and expedient.

Likewise, the title ‘Mouthful of Dirty Copper’ references a newspaper headline discussing the side effects of the COVID-19 medication Paxlovid, in which patients reported feeling a metallic taste despite its alleviation of the virus. But as in his paintings, Tseng has uncoupled the specificity of this reference in the title, instead conjuring a weight of metal to be felt viscerally, if still distastefully. Our bodies are caught between the universality of natural and manmade disasters, which are, in turn, always specific and experienced individually, even though they impact everyone, everywhere, collectively. Images make us aware of this interdependent and interspecies relationship between the personal collective; even though they can be fictive or altogether false, images have the potential to connect us across time and place, and what and how we present, treat or manufacture imagistically is a reflection of societies.

Nowhere is this better communicated than in the mirrored installation of the sizeable Scares and Pores (2024) with the pairing of the small-scale Cosmic Rejection (2024) and Stealing from Heaven (2024), the latter both paintings of aeroplanes wrecked onto the ground. Scares and Pores is substantial and dominates the gallery’s longest wall; the two smaller paintings are positioned on the opposite side. At the gallery’s centre, we are caught between Tseng’s portrayals, literally the middle of tragic scenes large and small, and figuratively amidst the enormity of nature, industry and personal experience.

‘Mouthful of Dirty Copper’ is on view from January 16 – March 1, 2025, at Magenta Plains, New York.

(The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its Editors.)