Chyrum Lambert moved to Los Angeles in 2012 and was immediately struck by the community of artists and poets he found there. “I didn’t go to art school, and I don’t have any formal education other than high school, so I’ve never had friends who are artists,” he said. “There’s just so much here that I never had in my life. This whole practice came out of LA.”
For around a decade, Lambert has ventured beyond typical painterly techniques to create his abstractions with different materials. He applies acrylic paint to large pieces of paper, some matte and others sheeny, onto which he has added grids of variations on painterly gestures—squiggles, strokes, circles—in a process he describes as a “borderline micromanaged approach where I have control over every aspect of the mark.” His studio is chock-full of such poster-size sheets, to which he might dedicate himself for a few weeks at a time, often painting with his fingers, rubber-tipped spatulas, or squeegees to achieve the various levels of opacity and transparency he’s after. “I can get marks that I wouldn’t be able to if I were working on a regular canvas,” he noted.
The best of these gestures are then cut, sometimes trimmed down in the process, and inked on the edges, so the white of the paper doesn’t show. At his shoebox studio in central LA, Lambert organizes some of his cutouts by color—greens, purples, pinks, blues, ochres—onto sheet pans that he stores in an industrial rack, like rising dough waiting to be baked. Other groupings are taped to the wall, surrounding pithy, poetic phrases scrawled on scraps of paper, like “capacity exceeds coffin” or “plain and simple, meteors colliding.” (He self-published an artist book of concrete poetry in 2021, titled Fore Word to an After World, during a yearlong stretch in which he stopped painting.) Of his decision to work with paper cutouts as opposed to applying paint directly to canvas, Lambert said, “I like it because there’s some distance from the material.”
Eventually, the component parts will be mounted onto wood panels that he carves and configures into different arrangements, with a keen eye toward how each element is framed within the overall composition. “The process of putting these things together is much more sculptural than typical painting,” he said.
Chyrum Lambert: Sight, A Traffic Of Magic—This Form Of Life, A Form Of Language, 2026.
Courtesy Chyrum Lambert
Recently, he began introducing photographic elements—also cut-up fragments from large C-prints—into his works. A friend had been holding on to an archive of some 10,000 analog images that Lambert had taken in the early 2000s. He began scanning and cataloging them, realizing that these impressionistic landscape shots of the Pacific Northwest, where Lambert lived before LA, “blend in perfectly with the marks” he paints—a fertile way to “bring more reality” into his abstract works.
Collaging together disparate parts is a mostly intuitive process, and Lambert sees it as a way to create a sense of order. “I want to present a system that was arrived at by my irrational choices,” he said, noting the similarity between the arrangements he makes and the poems he writes. “I lay things out as if it’s a page,” he said, “and as if those [elements] are text.”
