Cordy Ryman- Halsey McKay

By RIAD MIAH April 25, 2025

Cordy Ryman’s materials and working process have remained steady over the last several years, a constancy that has become integral to the evolution of his artistic language. This enduring approach allows viewers and critics to trace the subtle shifts in his visual and material sensibility over time, highlighting how innovation can emerge from repetition and how familiarity can foster deeper perceptual engagement with his work. They primarily consist of paint on wood, resulting in something resembling sculpture and painting, but never fully aligning with either. His work resists the confines of both media. If one were to simplify it with a definitive term, it would be most apt to say that Ryman creates objects. His casual and humble approach to making makes the work remain in flux, never settling, never static.

Installation of Cordy Ryman at Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, New York
 

I visited his current exhibition at Halsey McKay Gallery shortly after a studio visit with my students from Pratt Institute. During our time in his studio, Ryman described his process in detail. One particularly revealing moment occurred when he demonstrated his technique using a brush loaded with thinned acrylic paint. Working on a primed wooden panel laid horizontally, Ryman continued to paint even during a lull in conversation, not to illustrate a point, but seemingly out of an irrepressible need to make. Watching him was like a drummer instinctively finding a rhythm when sticks hit their hands. That same instinctual pulse is embedded in his current work, which thrums with visual rhythm and fluctuates between the macro and micro.

The Halsey McKay exhibition is a constellation of Ryman’s familiar techniques and motifs, executed with modest materials: wood, acrylic, and other studio related items including staples, nails, etc. The larger works—"Algae Scope”, “Saturn Sheet”, and “Echo Trace Sheet”—measure 96” x 48” and consist of single plywood sheets saturated with vibrant, gestural marks, color dispersion, and patterns. These compact fields of paint application operate like visual devices, each with a specific frequency and internal logic. They demand closer inspection, inviting the viewer to oscillate between surface and depth, between the mark and the material. These works are not simply painted; they are constructed, assembled, and intuitively made through response.

Cordy Ryman, Algae Scope, 2024, Acrylic on Wood, 96 x 48 inches
 

The smaller works—"Red Held,” “Veil Stitch,” and “Blue Held Moon” (roughly 30” x 30”)—retain this object-oriented ethos but offer a more intimate encounter. These pieces evoke the visual language of Color Field painters like Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, yet Cordy Ryman resists the flatness and optical resolution typical of those artists. Instead, he pushes the work toward objecthood, foregrounding the seams, edges, and layers that disrupt the illusion of pictorial space. A detail in "Veil Stitch" reveals how Ryman constructs line through the physical application of staples, rather than drawn or painted marks, further emphasizing his sculptural logic.

Cordy Ryman, Blue Held Moon, 2025, Acrylic on Wood, 28 x 28.5 x 0.5 inches

 The work “Constellation,” which consists of small pieces of acrylic-painted wood, acts as a key or footnote to the exhibition. Occupying an entire wall in the gallery, it forms a dispersed field of elements drawn from the larger works and vise-versa. These fragments allow the viewer to trace ideas and motifs across scales, functioning almost like a legend that decodes the vocabulary of the show. In doing so, “Constellation” quietly reinforces Ryman's macro-micro dialogue and the connective tissue running throughout the exhibition.

Cordy Ryman, Veil Stitch, 2025, Acrylic on Wood, 43 x 45 x 1 inches

What distinguishes Ryman’s practice is not simply his command of material, but his resistance to closure. His works do not present themselves as finished, polished artifacts. Instead, they appear as open-ended accumulations of decisions and gestures. This openness connects to a broader theoretical framework: the new causal approach to painting and object making. Rather than treating artwork as a static end product, this approach understands the work as an ongoing chain of actions and reactions—a process without a predetermined outcome.

In Ryman’s case, each piece evolves through a sequence of responsive acts: attach, paint, saw, staple, observe, repeat. There is no singular concept driving the work, no teleological arc. Each action creates a new set of possibilities, and each piece is the physical record of these decisions. In this way, Ryman’s works do not represent process—they are process. They exemplify a mode of making where causality is ambient, circumstantial, and rooted in the physical conversation between artist and material. The idea to create does not begin with the “what do I make” but “how do I create/ build...”

Cordy Ryman, Constellation, 2025, Acrylic on Wood

Pattern emerges in his work not as decorative repetition but as a structural rhythm—a framework of visual pacing akin to the underlying structure of a jazz composition or the modular integrity of architectural design, the echo of embodied actions. There is a physical cadence to the exhibition—a visual beat that moves across the gallery like a syncopated rhythm. Forms recur, colors reappear, edges repeat, yet nothing is identical. Like a jazz musician working through a theme, Ryman riffs on his materials, allowing variations to accumulate and collide. These patterns, though loosely held, create a coherence across the exhibition that is felt rather than seen.

The macro-micro dynamic further complicates the viewing experience. Step back, and the pieces assert themselves as architectural forms, placeholders of space. Move closer, and the surfaces reveal intricate layers of touch and labor—brush strokes, smudges, raw cuts, and stains. Ryman’s work occupies this liminal space between scale, forcing the viewer to constantly adjust their focus. His objects are not designed to be understood in a single glance; they unfold over time, through movement, through return.Despite the minimal economy of material, Ryman’s objects feel generous. Their casualness is deceptive, masking a rigor of intuition and iteration. The humility of his methods—working with offcuts, letting the wood grain show, allowing mistakes to remain visible—is not an aesthetic posture but a philosophical position. It is a commitment to contingency, to the poetics of the unfinished, to the truth of making.

In a cultural moment saturated with high production values and digital gloss—where artists like Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami often epitomize sleek, monumental perfection—Cordy Ryman’s exhibition at Halsey McKay offers a vital counterpoint, Cordy Ryman’s exhibition at Halsey McKay offers a vital counterpoint. His work invites viewers into a space of slowness and uncertainty, where meaning is provisional and form is elastic. He does not provide answers; he offers rhythms—visual, material, conceptual—that pulse just beneath the surface, waiting to be felt.

Cordy Ryman’s art is less about what it is than about what it does. It acts. It responds. It changes as you look. In this, his objects are profoundly alive—not in a metaphorical sense, but in their very constitution as temporal, causal, and contingent things. And in encountering them, we too are changed, if only for a moment, by the humble beat of their becoming. WM