Chyrum Lambert's Paper Cutouts: A Quiet Expansion of What a Painting Can Be

Chyrum Lambert has spent the better part of a decade making paintings that reward a second look. In the Los Angeles artist's established practice, surfaces are worked and reworked, accumulating density through layered oil until the picture feels less like an image than an event in material. The new body of work surfaced this month is a different proposition: paper cutouts, in which the image is not built up but taken away. According to a 29 June 2026 ARTNEWS feature by the publication, Lambert has moved deliberately beyond painterly accumulation toward abstraction constructed through subtraction, opening new dimensions in a practice that had begun to feel, even to the artist, like a closed circuit.

The shift matters because the dominant story about a mid-career painter is usually one of consolidation — the artist who finds a method, masters it, then spends the next two decades defending it. Lambert appears to be doing the opposite: taking a method that works and reaching for one that might not, on the assumption that a closed loop is a more dangerous place than a difficult new room.

From added paint to subtracted paper

The paper cutouts, as described in ARTNEWS, are not sketches for paintings and not preparatory studies. They are finished objects that stand on their own. The material economy is reversed: where a painting accumulates pigment, the cutout begins with a sheet and removes what is not the image. The result, in the publication's account, is an abstraction in which edges do as much compositional work as mass — a contour defined by what is missing rather than what is present.

Lambert's prior work has been characterised by an interest in surface as a record of decision-making, where brushstrokes register as evidence of a back-and-forth between the artist's intention and the material's resistance. Cut paper changes that relation. The decision is binary and largely irreversible: once the sheet is cut, it cannot be uncut. Each work therefore functions as a record not of negotiation but of commitment. ARTNEWS frames this as a deliberate inversion of the painter's habit, an attempt to test whether the artist's instincts survive when the medium refuses to let him revise.

The counter-read: when a "new direction" is just a sketch

The contrarian case is straightforward and worth naming. A working painter who produces a series of paper pieces is not, by that fact alone, expanding the definition of the practice. Cut paper has a long twentieth-century lineage — Matisse being the obvious reference point — and a more recent history in contemporary practice as a discrete medium with its own dealers, fairs, and price bands. Sceptics will read the cutouts either as a marketing palette-cleanser before a larger canvas show, or as the visible residue of a studio process that has always existed off-stage.

The reason to take the new direction seriously rather than dismiss it is that Lambert is not rebranding; he is making the secondary process primary. If the cutouts were maquettes, they would be small and preparatory; ARTNEWS describes them as discrete, exhibited works in their own right. That is the harder read, and it is the one the publication's reporting supports.

A wider frame: abstraction and the Los Angeles context

Los Angeles has, for several decades, run a parallel track to New York in the story of post-war American abstraction. Where the East Coast lineage is filtered through the critical apparatus of the School of New York, the West Coast version has tended to be quieter, more materially experimental, and less invested in the rhetorical claim to be advancing the medium. Lambert sits inside that tradition. His move from oil to paper is the kind of mid-career gesture that the LA scene tends to reward: less a statement than an inquiry, treated by the surrounding institutions as evidence of a working studio rather than a brand pivot.

The structural point is that abstraction in 2026 is no longer carried by a single dominant school. The market and the critical apparatus are now genuinely plural, with painting, sculpture, works on paper, and digital media all supporting credible mid-career and late-career practices without subordinating one to another. An artist choosing to exhibit paper cutouts next to paintings is not stepping down a hierarchy; the hierarchy itself has flattened. That context matters because it shapes how a body of work like Lambert's is received — not as a digression from the main line, but as one of several legitimate endpoints.

What remains uncertain

The reporting in ARTNEWS is feature-length and presents the cutouts in positive terms, which is the job of a feature. There are questions the coverage does not resolve and that this publication cannot resolve from a single feature. The institutional context of the cutouts — whether they will travel as a standalone exhibition, whether a commercial gallery has taken them on, whether they are intended as a one-off series or a sustained new practice — is not specified in the available reporting. The reception history, including any critical pushback or collector response, is similarly outside the scope of what has been published.

What the source material does support is narrower and more defensible: that Lambert, an LA-based painter with an established practice, has produced a body of paper cutouts described by a tier-one art publication as a meaningful expansion of his method, executed in subtraction rather than accumulation, and presented as finished work rather than preparation. On those terms, the move is significant.

The Monexus desk reads this against the wire frame in which mid-career artists are expected to consolidate; the more interesting story is the artist who treats consolidation as the risk and reach as the discipline.