From Our Archives: Sebastiaan Bremer
Sebastiaan Bremer, Ave Maria 9, 2016
This interview was originally featured in Issue No. 17 — Enigma.
ANDREA BLANCH: Where are you from?
SEBASTIAAN BREMER: I’m from Amsterdam, I moved to NYC when I was twenty-one. In Amsterdam I studied at the Vrije Academie, and I studied at Skowhegan School of Art and Sculpture in Maine. I currently reside in Brooklyn. My art prac- tice is a spiritual one. You make magical objects, about something you care deeply about, which is bigger than anything you can understand or control. You have to have faith when you create something. At my son’s Bar Mitzvah, he proposed an eleventh commandment: “if thou shalt practice religion, thou shalt be tolerant of all other beliefs.” Then the Rabbi asked him, “Tobias, is there a twelfth?” He said, “if you practice religion, thou shalt have a sense of humor.” I found a lot to embrace in this! — Art is not a linear practice: you have to give yourself over. It’s a dirty little secret that I think a lot of artists are shy about.
ANDREA: How does this thinking relate to your work, your practice?
SEBASTIAAN: My process is playful. There is no clear plan or story I am trying to tell. I manipulate photographs which evoke a familiar feeling — something I have a deep connection to. As I draw on these photographs, a story is told — something seen through my eyes, an intrinsic human response to emotion and to memory. What I create are visual manifestations of my ideas.
Sebastiaan Bremer, Eye #11, 2012 (After Bill Brandt’s “Henry Moore’s eye, 1972”)
ANDREA: During your early years you meticulously reproduced photographs using paint, now you paint directly onto photographs, changing them instead of reproducing them. How did this transition come about?
SEBASTIAAN: I have always drawn, and I took up painting after high school. I used photographs as my source ma- terial. I began to realize that my paintings were constrained by the limitation of the photograph I was referencing. During my residency at Skowhegan, I took a risk and rid myself of all the conventions of painting to create some- thing that would not stifle me. The challenge was to make something that was complex and interesting. I began drawing on top of photographs that I felt connected to, creating complexities and new stories.
Working like this allowed me to create more because I was able to roll my drawings up and bring them to work. For a time, I was working as a producer on commercial photo shoots — a job which involved a lot of waiting around—which allowed me to create my work.
ANDREA: Photographs capture specific moments in time; by altering them are you commenting on the temporal nature of photography?
SEBASTIAAN: Yes, a photograph is literally a slice of life or a captured moment. If you start adding to that, in any way, you expand the moment, you layer and stretch it. The reality is altered. It’s like time travel—you can insert yourself into another moment, or revisit a memory.
Sebastiaan Bremer, Eye #1, 2012 (After Bill Brandt’s “Max Ernst’s left eye, 1963”)
ANDREA: So what comes first, the idea or the photographs? Do you seek out images for a specific project or do certain photographs inspire the projects?
SEBASTIAAN: Both.
ANDREA: You usually take your own photographs, but the images from the eye series are all from other people, why use found images for this series in particular?
SEBASTIAAN: Because I was mirroring myself. These were all pictures taken by Bill Brandt. I was intimately exposed to his work because his work is represented in New York by the same gallery as where I show, Edwynn Houk Gallery. His prints were made for publication — meaning that the contrast is perfect for printing — but if you see the real thing you see that there’s a lot of mark making on top with pen and ink. All photography has been retouched to a certain degree. And that was really interesting to me, because what I do is a bit sacrilegious. I draw and paint, with my hand, on a photograph — all this stuff you’re not supposed to do. This is all photography itself, retouching and mark-making and doing whatever it takes to get the image right. But it used to be that the object of the photograph was not important to photographers, it was really the book that it went to, it was about the reproduction; it wasn’t about the one magical print. So I saw Bill Brandt’s pictures and the painterly component of it, and then he had this series of pictures where he took the details of these portraits and focused on the eyes of all these artists. Those eyes seem to me like a playback device that stores what it has seen. Since these are all artists, they’re all trying to figure something out, they’re all trying to make sense of this world. The brain behind it adds another layer and their spirituality adds something else, and then as artists they’re pushing it out into the world again with their hands or by other means. I felt at that moment a need for fraternity and kinship. I thought that if I drew what I saw in those photographs, maybe I could represent some of the magic of these characters.
Sebastiaan Bremer, Eye #4, 2012 (After Bill Brandt’s “George Braque’s eye, 1960”);
ANDREA: How did you get permission to do that?
SEBASTIAAN: You can draw on photographs, but in this case, it was the grandson of Bill Brandt who takes care of the estate and he gave me permission through the gallery. It’s actually one of the few times I had proper permission! But what I do is so transformative of the pictures that there’s not really a problem with issues of copyright. Also because I don’t use it for reproduction — it’s an original piece which I change and create.
ANDREA: Eyes are often said to be the window of the soul, after doing this series would you agree?
SEBASTIAAN: I’ve gone back and forth with that a lot, but yes.
ANDREA: Your photographs of the eyes, they are so powerful.
SEBASTIAAN: That might actually be a bit of a problem. They are so present, and so confrontational; it might be a lot to deal with on a daily basis. But I think it’s impossible to know what people are going to gravitate towards. And you can’t fake things. It just doesn’t work. If you’re going to set out to please other people, you will fail, because you’re not pleasing yourself. You have to care about what you’re doing because otherwise, it’s pointless. It’s a real quest, and sometimes you end up making things that might seem to you like too much, too intense, and people won’t like it, but you have no idea. It might actually be the very thing that everybody responds to: I really love that horrible violent thing; it’s going to give me a lot of peace. Conversely there are images, which, like these flowers, could easily be thought to be superficial or pretty. They actually come from something very different than what you would think — there’s a story behind it that is not as pleasant as a picture of a flower suggests. Their origin has more to do with war and immigration issues than it has to do with pretty flowers.
You can never second-guess your audience, or your heart. You have to just go with it.
ANDREA: The gaze is a dominating element in this series, why is this significant for you?
SEBASTIAAN: Because I really like to look at things. Like you said, looking into other people’s eyes is a really intense, powerful thing. There’s also something really sad about those pictures in that sense because they’re inert, most of them are not alive anymore, and there is something that you cannot reach anymore. Also because they’re so disembodied.
ANDREA: In painting on the images of eyes, you change the way we perceive them. What do you feel this says about vision, are you trying to change the perception?
SEBASTIAAN: Yeah, it can be hard to discern if it’s really an eye or not, but then you get this weird thing where you think things are unintelligible to other people. Sometimes you’ve done something to a picture, and I always know what’s underneath, so I have one particular way of looking at an image, but other people can come to it very differently. And still it’s remarkable how often people catch the sentiment you thought you’d hidden so well. Communication is much easier than people think, and it crosses more cultures than one may give credit to.
ANDREA: How significant do you think chance is in your work?
SEBASTIAAN: Very much. Chance is a tricky word. I find things moving on in a particular direction and very often I have a picture that I really like and I’ll keep it. Maybe I’ll then misplace it, and think it’s lost forever. Then it will suddenly reappear fifteen years later and it’ll be just the right time for it. But where chance comes in, I really don’t know. Maybe I just didn’t care for the picture at the time — things appear significant depending on your interests — so it’s hard to say. But what often happens is that since I work with my hands and I’m pretty organized — though not in the traditional sense of being neat! — certain accidents take place. Miles Davis says a nice thing about that talking about “wrong notes;” it’s not that a note itself is wrong — it’s the note you play next that determines if it’s a mistake. I don’t go back, and this is why I like working by hand with objects, and not on a computer. Things happen as they occur and sometimes there’s a big boo-boo somewhere that places me on a trajectory, and then I have to do the next thing, and it’s going to be very exciting. Sometimes things go horribly wrong and you have to throw the thing away entirely. But more often than not, I transform it into something I like.
Sebastiaan Bremer, Eye #2, 2012 (After Bill Brandt’s “Jean Arp’s eye, 1960”)
ANDREA: Was that the most challenging thing you’ve worked on?
SEBASTIAAN: Like all really good things, it was very challenging. But the exhibition I made right after my son’s Bar Mitzvah was also one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. Just a few weeks ago I did something completely insane — and challenging on many levels. It was also the most pleasurable and delightful experience I’ve ever had in my life.
ANDREA: What was that?
SEBASTIAAN: I turned a church into a playground for artists. There was a PA system for live performances, a huge screen for showing movies, a smoke machine and snow machine, and a complete lighting rig, like in a theatre. That was the “toolbox,” plus there were also three permanent art installations. But when it was time for Mass, you could flip a switch, change the lights, the smoke disappeared, and it was a church again. And when you flip everything back on — boom you have a magic castle. A church is smoke and mirrors — it can be a magical place — but sadly churches have not really done that properly for the last fifteen hundred years. For it to work, it had to be done right — and it had to interest me and entertain me. I knew I had to get a PR agency, and have professionals do the lighting and sound, because if you invite Meredith Monk, you need to make sure the sound is perfect! It was called Sanctuary, and we had twenty days of programming. Many people questioned my sanity because I also needed to raise money for it! But we ended up raising money for RAINN (the coalition against violence towards women) and for the homeless program run by the church. It was really a non-ego based art project which had nothing to do with money—it was progressive and politi- cal in a subtle way. One result was that ninety percent of the artists involved were women!
ANDREA: So what’s next?
SEBASTIAAN: Sanctuary 21c opens at 21c in Nashville on May 4th, and I’ve been working on Ave Maria which opens at the Edwynn Houk Gallery on May 3rd. It’s a bittersweet narrative — like everything else in the world. If you’ve been together with somebody for twenty-three years, we are not the same people anymore — she’s not the same, I’m not the same, and we’ve changed each other, for good and bad. I wanted to put an altitude map with height lines of mountains to see where she is, where I stop, and where I enter.
To view the full interview, visit Issue No. 17 — Enigma.
