ABRACADABRA Print

A tightrope walker between the spiritual and the material A painter who worked with the Scottish artist Richard Wright before living for a time in the legendary Brocéliande forest, Arthur Lambert seems to have already lived several lives. With these artistic, aesthetic and personal experiences, he gradually abandoned figurative painting on canvas and became interested in watercolour and the disappearance/dissolution of the human figure. He retains of painting the passion for colour, the vibration of lines and shapes, while his works increasingly reveal their abstract, optical dimension. The use of paper allows him to assert the materiality of drawing, and he draws with a variety of different techniques and media: gouache, gold leaf, painting on a photograph, Japanese paper. Walking on a wire, Arthur Lambert progresses with precision and mastery of all his tools. According to him, drawing is tantamount to experiencing a world, looking at a splinter of this shared universe and crossing it, feeling it. Demanding great concentration, his works involve both old and modern techniques in the creation of a sensible architecture based on the golden number. Drawing inspiration from tribal art, he captures its formal impact and magical dimension. Pervaded by the strong symbolism of the circle or of a form based on the Mandorla, his works span a variety of techniques and bridges different worlds. Current cosmologies, reflections of heavenly and mystical dimensions, they summon strong symbolism from primary forms that clash with each other. Playing on our optical, or haptic, apprehension, the patterns and textures highlighted by Arthur Lambert become cosmic and solar systems where textural saturation is combined with a spiritual dimension. Forming the background of his works, alchemy contributes to this transformation of reality into a poetic and miraculous fiction. Arthur Lambert highlights these transformed states of nature and being. Removing oneself from the world is one of the keys to unlocking this fantastic journey within a secret, coded language. Allegorical and mysterious images ranging from the natural, the supernatural, the divine and the human, these “illuminations” allow the artist to initiate a search between the heavenly and the earthly, between object and subject. Everyone is invited to decipher the musicality of forms and test the boundaries of these interior landscapes. Marianne Derrien