If the Renaissance established painting as an “open window” into the world, aiming for perfect imitation of reality (Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura), the modern age liberated the medium from its strictly figurative and celebratory value, allowing it to explore psychological, emotional and poetic realms. This approach characterizes the work of Dominic Chambers, a talented painter and recent Yale graduate whose practice has garnered wide acclaim over the past years, quickly leading to his debut with the esteemed gallery Lehmann Maupin in London. Following the show’s opening, Observer spoke with Dominic to discuss how this body of work represents both a continuation and evolution of his practice, which now embraces a more abstract, lyrical dimension.
Spanning two floors of the gallery’s Cromwell Place space in London’s South Kensington, the exhibition showcases a range of his vivid and expansive paintings, brightly colored studies and more intimate works on paper. It takes its title from the Greek word “Meraki,” which, as the artist explains, lacks a direct English equivalent but translates roughly to “pouring one’s soul into one’s work.” In this series, Dominic intensifies his exploration of painting as a vehicle to convey a profound inner vision of reality—one that transcends mere sensory or material aspects to tap into a more emotional, primal connection between the soul and the world.
The works on show signify a graduation of sorts from his previous bodies of work, including those presented in his recent solo exhibition at the gallery in New York. Although these new paintings operate within the same school of thought and employ a similar mode of making, retaining elements like color field painting and touches of surrealism or magical realism that have always characterized his practice, they also push further. “They embody poetic ideas or become forms of poetry,” Chambers said, drawing a parallel to René Magritte’s statement that the function of painting is “to make poetry visible.” For this artist, painting is about deeply perceiving and absorbing the world, then translating it into poetic terms that reveal universal elements of human experience. “It’s about capturing a spiritual component… a surreal component to our own reality.”
In this way, Chambers’ paintings act as allegories of situations that resonate with everyday life yet transcend specific events to achieve a more universal, poetic quality. This approach also underpins his surreal use of color, which serves as a tool to convey distinct emotional and psychological states. “Color is a character and a protagonist in my work,” he said. “If color could take on a body, a form, an identity, for me, it would be like an angel, functioning as a messenger in historical paintings.”
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Literature informs and inspires Chambers’ work, guiding it into a metaphorical, highly symbolic realm that distills the essential sensations through which we experience the world. His paintings attempt to translate a psychological and spiritual universe, embracing the idea that our understanding of our surroundings emerges from a complex interplay of memory, imagination, emotion and observed reality—a continuous dialectic between the inner self and the external world.
Mary Oliver’s poetry has had a profound influence on Chambers’ practice. “Her poetry is all about observing the world with passion and devotion and finding poetry within the surrounding landscape,” he explained, pointing out parallels to his own approach—something that can be seen The Summoning World (Studio Angel) (2024), a large-scale painting that fuses the artist’s studio with a tranquil landscape inhabited by a single, reclining angel. “It is essentially my interior domain manifested as an image,” Chambers said. “It’s a zone of creative production, where objects are made by the artist, but also a space where the whole world converges—the past, present, future, friends, family and memories. Your entire inner landscape.” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings, particularly The Over-Soul (which discusses an “interconnective tissue” linking our inner world with our surroundings), have also influenced his work. “He describes how one deposits the oversoul into an object, like writing or reading, creating a bridge between your inner landscape and the wider world.”
Throughout our conversation, Chambers frequently returns to the notion of devotion—a deeply contemplative engagement with one’s environment. There’s an almost spiritual quality in his work, echoing the allegorical techniques of traditional Christian paintings alluding to otherworldly dimensions. Yet Chambers remains grounded in the physical, sensory experience of our world, seeking not the “divine” but the “spiritual interconnectedness” of beings in nature. For Chambers, painting itself is the angel, the messenger, hinting at this other dimension of reality. “These paintings—or these poems, as I would consider them—are ways of articulating an idea,” he said. “A poem and a painting are the same: they are both vessels for expression.”
Chambers describes his new body of work as a more complete mise en scène of the elements that have consistently characterized his practice: symbolic landscapes inhabited by ghostly figures, individual characters in moments of introspection and scenes of reconnection with the inner self. In the London show, these components converge into deeply evocative, dreamlike scenes that capture both the spiritual and the physical aspects of reality, blending in the psyche and then using symbols to communicate shared human experiences. Even in Lemon Hour (Where You’ll Find Me), the young man’s own universe merges with the landscape around him.
In embracing and translating this holistic view of the world, Chambers’ paintings revive the child’s unfiltered gaze—a way of seeing that blurs lines between self and surroundings, between imagination and sensory experience, perceiving everything as deeply interconnected and interdependent. Chambers is especially drawn to rekindling this sense of pure “wonder.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, a recurring element in his work is the flying kite, as seen in The Indra Sign (2024); they punctuate landscapes inhabited by small, anonymous figures—characters open to identification through personal memory or imagination. “The wonders of youth are very exciting to me, but also the complicated parts, when we start to understand how vast and fast the world is,” he concluded. “I love the idea that a painting can be a vehicle of time, a medium for time travel, igniting your ability to wonder again.”
In this sense, the seemingly surreal elements in his work serve as reminders of both the joy and awe of childhood, as well as the bittersweet loss of that innocent, transcendent way of seeing the world—one that, at least symbolically, can be revived within Chambers’ imagined realm.
Dominic Chambers’ “Meraki” is on view at Lehmann Maupin, London, through November 9.
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