Artists have intermingled the mediums of photography and painting since the inception of photography in the nineteenth century. Even further back, according to David Hockney's Secret Knowledge, painters of the Renaissance used optic tools such as the camera obscura and the camera lucida to usher in a new era of realism in Western art. Once these techniques were finally captured through chemicals as photographs, painting and photography began a process of defining and redefining each other and their conceptual underpinnings. Within a century, photography helped to liberate painting from its illustrative obligation, while artists and theorists released photography from the limitations of realism and documentation.

But despite the emancipation of postmodernism, the things that we see in a photograph, the pictorial assumptions that remain convincingly tied to life, are hard to undermine. Which is why the work of Sebastiaan Bremer is so surprisingly effective. He paints on photographs, which would not be extraordinary but for the startling effect he achieves. His specific painting style, combined with an eye for compatible photographic subject and composition, opens his pictures into a world that feels newly discovered. At once appealing and mystifying, Bremer's hybrid works are striking in their immediate impact and mesmerising as they reveal themselves, slowly, with continued scrutiny. Similar to the breathe of new life William Kentridge has given to the hybrid of charcoal drawing and film, Bremer's work gracefully carves out a form of photography that has not really existed, in just this way, before. With all the charm, but not the rigidity, of a lenticular image, Bremer's works transform before the eye, encouraging the viewer to move physically in order to read into their shifting perspectives of both space and time.

Heather Snider for EYEMAZING: Your painting style is in many ways opposite to what Rembrandt did. Whereas he had an uncanny ability to transform two dimensions into something so solid, and lifelike, you use paint to create imagery that seems to slip back and forth between dimensions. As you wander creatively through his world, and his history, where do you find yourself? Do you feel like a painter? A photographer? An upstart? A portal?

Sebastiaan Bremer: I have no idea. My work gets called photography, painting, or drawing, depending on who is talking. I guess it's an amalgam of all the above. I think most artists mix media, and are not really concerned with what medium they use. At issue is more what they want to say, by whatever means. I have been drawing since I was young and I feel most comfortable when I sit at a table, so that is how I work most of the time. When I guest-teach here in the US and in Europe I find that most art students are crossing borders all the time. The painting department students tend to make sculpture and photography as much as the students in the sculpture or photography departments, and vice versa. I like it when I can't entirely figure out how a thing is made at first glance. Like a slight of hand trick – at some point you just have to give up and look at whatever you are standing in front of, and get lost for a little while. Sometimes in museums you see people doing a funny dance, moving back and forth: they lean in to see the image disintegrate and become paint blobs, and then they go back out again to see the image cohere. I think for a lot of us that moment of transition is fascinating. Perhaps we all like to be fooled and want to see how it all comes together and falls apart. And even if you know how, it can still be magical.

TEXT BY HEATHER SNIDER

Courtesy, Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York