Chyrum Lambert’s abstractions begin with paper, then move toward sculpture, collage, and text.
For about a decade, the Los Angeles artist has been building works that sidestep the usual logic of painting. In his central LA studio, he applies acrylic to large sheets of paper, some matte and some glossy, then cuts the painted forms, trims them further, and inks the edges so the white of the paper does not show. The process is exacting, but not rigid. Lambert uses his fingers, rubber-tipped spatulas, and squeegees to produce marks with different levels of opacity and transparency, describing the method as a “borderline micromanaged approach where I have control over every aspect of the mark.”
The resulting fragments are stored by color on sheet pans in an industrial rack, where greens, purples, pinks, blues, and ochres sit in neat stacks. Other pieces are taped to the wall around handwritten phrases such as “capacity exceeds coffin” and “plain and simple, meteors colliding.” Lambert self-published a concrete poetry book, Fore Word to an After World, in 2021, during a yearlong period when he stopped painting altogether.
Eventually, the cut paper elements are mounted onto wood panels that he carves and arranges with close attention to framing and composition. Lambert said the process is “much more sculptural than typical painting,” a description that fits the way his works seem assembled rather than simply painted.
Photographic material has recently entered the mix. Lambert began incorporating fragments from large C-prints after a friend held onto an archive of roughly 10,000 analog images he made in the early 2000s. He scanned and cataloged the photographs, including impressionistic landscape views of the Pacific Northwest, where he lived before moving to Los Angeles. Those images, he said, “blend in perfectly with the marks” he paints and help “bring more reality” into the abstractions.
What emerges is a practice built on juxtaposition: paper against wood, image against gesture, language against form. Lambert sees the whole as a kind of ordering principle, one that begins in intuition and ends in structure. “I want to present a system that was arrived at by my irrational choices,” he said. “I lay things out as if it’s a page, and as if those [elements] are text.”
ContemporaryArt AbstractPainting MixedMedia Collage LosAngelesArt ChyrumLambert
