Bremer turns photographs—found or snapped—of himself, his family, and appropriated imagery into trippy, dust-laden memories that, through his layered pointillist technique, reveal the subconscious and the real world in the blink of an eye. By laboriously painting his poetic braille over fast snapshots, he slows down time to render hauntingly beautiful interior landscapes—spaces where personal memory, art history, and cultural symbolism converge.
He maintains an extensive archive of images, ranging from intimate family photographs to pages sourced from historical flower books, particularly those rooted in the Dutch tradition of floriculture. Carefully sorting through this material, Bremer selects images that resonate with his memory, using them as the groundwork for each piece. His recurring engagement with floral imagery—tulips, roses, irises, and other blooms—places his work in dialogue with a long lineage of Dutch still life painting, while simultaneously reconfiguring it through a contemporary, psychological lens.
Once an image is chosen, redeveloped, and printed to size, Bremer begins to draw intricate webs of small dots with white retouching paint across the photographic surface. Paradoxically, this process obscures sections of the original image while redefining others, embedding new layers of meaning. His ethereal markings spread organically, like mycelial growth, evoking both proliferation and decay. Thin washes of coloured India ink are occasionally added, creating visual sensations akin to the colours perceived behind closed eyes.
Within his flower works, blooms become more than decorative motifs—they function as mutable symbols, at once seductive and unstable. Expanding, dissolving, and recombining across the surface, they evoke associations ranging from the intimate to the historical, from cycles of growth to the fragility of life. Drawing on the legacy of tulip imagery in the Netherlands—where beauty, commerce, and speculation have long been intertwined—Bremer’s practice reflects on the enduring entanglement of desire, value, and transience. His flowers carry echoes of memento mori traditions, embodying both vitality and inevitable decay, suggesting the delicate balance between joy and loss.
Each piece varies in its level of abstraction, shifting between figuration and dissolution. The visceral quality of Bremer’s work lies in its inventiveness and technical complexity, while his compositions maintain a fine balance between the intricate and the bold. Whether rooted in a fleeting emotion, a resurfacing memory, or the symbolic charge of a flower in bloom, each work opens onto layered worlds—where the personal and the historical, the aesthetic and the existential, unfold simultaneously.
