Chris Natrop is an artist based in Los Angeles, California. While known primarily as an installation-artist that utilizes hand-cut paper, Natrop has begun integrating a variety of other material into his work. Transparent plastics, video projection and multi-channel audio are often employed alongside works of intricate, hand-cut paper to create fully immersive environments within gallery and museum spaces. The viewer is encouraged to enter these room-sized installations to directly experience the realm the artist has set up where elements of light, shadow and form coalesce into a fully unified world. Most of the individual components are hand-cut in the artist’s studio and then custom-arranged for a particular exhibition space. For his works on paper, each piece is spontaneously created without the use of patterns or pre-drawing-this stream-of-consciousness approach is, in fact, the crux of the artist’s practice. Graphic silhouettes emerge from a meditative-channeling activated by the repetitive practice of cutting paper. Natrop works on enormous sheets of Lenox 100 drawing paper stretched out vertically on his studio wall. Wielding a standard utility knife, he spontaneously cuts away at the paper to create a hybrid of landscape imagery. Natrop’s free-form process of “knife drawing” reveals the negative space by removing the emptiness in-between forms. Often an amalgam of things previously observed, the graphic nature of the work becomes a freeze-frame of Natrop’s own direct surroundings revealing the artist’s particular sense of place. In many cases one feature will be multiplied over and over, resulting in a dense layering of a single element. A multiplicity of water droplets, crawling vines or cracks in the pavement may be rendered and reworked within each installation. Emotional forces further contextualize the work within this structure: feelings of anticipation, apprehension, disorientation or joyfulness often encapsulate the work’s inherently myopic narrative. This fusion between internal, emotional space and the external, physical landscape continue to be the framework for much of Natrop’s practice.
