This Artist's Paper Cutouts Are Building Entire New Worlds

Imagine a decade of artistic obsession, all leading to a studio filled with hundreds of meticulously painted, then chopped-up, pieces of paper. That's Chyrum Lambert's world. He didn't go to art school, but after moving to Los Angeles in 2012, he found himself surrounded by artists and poets, and suddenly, his own practice began to bloom.

For roughly ten years, Lambert has been perfecting a process that's less painting, more architectural construction. He starts by painting large sheets of paper with acrylics, layering grids of squiggles, strokes, and circles. He calls it a "micromanaged approach," because apparently, someone needs to be in charge of every single painted dot.

His studio is a glorious, organized mess of these poster-sized sheets. He might work on them for weeks, using everything from his fingers to rubber spatulas to get just the right mix of transparent and opaque effects. This allows him to create marks that a traditional canvas just wouldn't allow. Which, if you think about it, is both impressive and slightly terrifying for anyone who's ever tried to get paint to behave.

Then comes the cutting. He trims the best painted sections, inks the edges so no pesky white paper shows, and organizes them by color. They live on sheet pans in an industrial rack, or taped to his wall, surrounding short, poetic phrases he’s written, like the wonderfully evocative "capacity exceeds coffin."

After a year-long hiatus in 2021 to publish a book of concrete poetry, Fore Word to an After World, Lambert returned to his paper obsession, preferring the "distance from the material" that cutouts provide over direct painting. Eventually, these tiny, perfect fragments are mounted onto carved wood panels, a process he describes as "much more sculptural than typical painting." Because apparently, even painting needs to hit the gym sometimes.

When Old Photos Meet New Abstractions

Recently, Lambert added a new twist: photography. He's incorporating cut-up C-prints from an archive of about 10,000 analog photos he took in the early 2000s. A friend had held onto them, and now Lambert is scanning and cataloging them, bringing them back from the analog abyss.

He quickly realized these landscape photos from his pre-LA life in the Pacific Northwest "blend in perfectly with the marks" he paints. It's his way of injecting "more reality" into his abstract pieces, like a surprise cameo from a long-lost friend.

Collaging these disparate elements is mostly intuitive for Lambert, a way to create order out of what he calls his "irrational choices." He sees his arrangements much like his poems, laying things out "as if it's a page," with each element acting as "text." Because in his world, even a painted squiggle and a scanned tree can have a conversation.