Joseph Lambert was born in 1950 in the small village of Ardennes, Belgium. For years he took a daily bus to work in a protected atelier, where he focused primarily on woodworking. He continued to focus on this for a long time, making colorful furniture of joined lengths of plank, paneling, and lathes fitting the pieces together like puzzles in a sort of homespun marquetry.
This previous experience translates to his drawings. Where before he wasted no piece of wood, in his drawings there is no wasted gesture. He starts a drawing with language and letters though he does not speak very much himself. As he begins one can see the letters with their familiar contours, but he does not stop with a readable paragraph, instead he continues to write over what he has written before until the letters disappear under a mass of marks. He lays his words down in stratum—like geological layers until they are abstracted into superimposed lines of color. Visually these compositions could be perceived as vast foggy landscapes that sometimes lead into primary forests, or to the edge of the sea. He sees them as letters and stories...they are his mode of visual speech in lieu of his physical reluctance to communicate verbally.