Ryan Cronin
Untitled (Metal Roof + Object)
Untitled (Metal Roof + Object)
*Untitled (Metal Roof + Object)* is one panel of a standing seam metal roof, painted. Cronin salvaged the panel from a 227-year-old post-and-beam home in the Hudson Valley. He tore the roof off himself. He kept this panel. The rest was recycled.
He started painting it in 2021 and finished it in 2025. Four years of returning to the same surface, working on and off, the painting accumulating the way the roof itself accumulated weather over a century. The piece holds both timelines. The seams of the standing seam construction read across the field. The panel is dented, banged, imperfect. It will continue to change as it is handled. That is the work.
The skull and crossbones, the bottles, the diamond patterns, and the painted word LUXURE. Cronin treated the roof the way he has always treated signage and Americana. The word painted on a hundred-year-old roof. Above the panel, a separate wood element from the same home is installed as part of the work. Two pieces of the house, painted, hung together.
*Untitled (Metal Roof + Object)* is the piece where Cronin returned to the found object work that runs alongside his painting practice. After years of constructed forms and cut-outs, this is where he dove back into seeing art in the material that was already around him. Material with its own provenance, its own age, its own marks before he ever got to it.
A piece that started as a roof.
Metal roof panel: 60" x 60" · Oil paint on salvaged 100-year-old standing seam metal roofing
Wood wall element: 15" x 54" · Oil paint on salvaged post-and-beam wood
2021 to 2025 · Signed verso
Materials reclaimed from a 227-year-old Hudson Valley home. Surface remains delicate; minor changes may occur with handling.
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