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Sebastiaan Bremer turns photographs into dreams. Like a dream, Three Guilty Landscapes—the new print series he made in collaboration with Graphicstudio—overflows with memories, thoughts, ideas, and layers of meaning. Working with colored backgrounds, the Dutch-born artist silkscreened drawings of trees recalled from rural walks in upstate New York; between these images, he layered photographs of forests, which he then altered by hand with paint and ink. “I wanted to reach back as far as possible back in time for this series,” Bremer says. Among his inspirations, he explains, were “nineteenth-century photographs by Eugene Cuvelier, Henry Le Secq, and Constant Famin, early pioneers of the medium in landscape.”
Bremer says he conceived of these three prints—Sunken Forest, Sous Bois, and Rendez-Vous—while also thinking of the artist Armando (Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd). Armando, an important Dutch postwar artist, coined the term “guilty landscapes” in response to years spent growing up next to a German concentration camp near Amersfoort, Holland. Bremer’s own American-inspired guilty landscapes hover between night and day, past and present, reality and unreality. Equal part prints, photographs and drawings, his trees appear and disappear into fields of dots that suggest hidden lives and meanings far beyond the images’ surface.
