When you stop to look at Julio Brujis’ pictures you soon realize that something very odd is going on. Images like Pastoruri or The City look like regular photographs, and with their wooden frames they set up in the viewer an expectation of solidity, of physical presence. However hard the eye may hunt for it, though, his landscapes and cityscapes have no discernible point of view. All familiarity, verisimilitude – indeed any sense of perceived and dutifully recorded reality – have been stripped away. Scale and perspective relations are out of kilter. Buildings have been moved, replaced and reenvisioned. Landscape features melt into each other, lower over one another or are repeated as a pattern in eerie and unexpected ways.

Focus is scattered; and if you try to locate where the picture is taken from, you soon lose yourself in a maze. Brujis’ images, in fact, contrive to bypass and deny entry to both the eye and the ‘I’ of the spectator. They are objects without subject: seen from everywhere and all at once, denuded of human reference or mediation. They seem to belong to a time before man or after man, to be God’s-eye views or else panorama of an alien parallel universe.

The best way to approach these remarkable images is to understand that Brujis is essentially a painter. Indeed that’s how he began (after a short period studying computers), as a painter of abstract landscapes in his native Peru. In this, of course, Brujis is exactly like one of those 19th-century painters who took off for Morocco, Tunisia or Egypt and only produced finished pictures when back at their studios, surrounded by souvenirs and sketches. Most of the latest work is the product of a recent journey to two separate areas of Peru, Yauyos and Ancash. But the analogy between painting and what Brujis does cuts deeper. For what he brings back from his field trips are not just sketches but a palette: a palette that has considerably broadened and deepened in these new pieces. For he has begun, in developing his raw material, to photograph each element in his panoramas at different exposures and speeds, often returning to them and repeating the process at different times of day. And this has given him even greater freedom to choose, to invent, to depict what remains in his mind’s eye. It has also given this recent work a fresh and sometimes alarming new subtlety by taking time and the fixedness of light out of the pictorial equation of the finished piece. The places he shows are outside time and beyond the point of view. They are both total and non-existent.

There is one last way in which Brujis’ work can be directly related to painting. For just as the painters of the early part of the 20th century were forced into new ways of thinking and seeing by the invention of photography, he has managed to bring back into these manipulated photographs many of the strategies they employed. Is he a point-of-view killing cubist? A collagist? A surrealist? An abstract artist? He is, of course, all four.

But he is also something more. For whenever I see works like Churup or Huancaya, I am reminded of the story of the young Australian Aboriginal being taught perspective in a reformatory. He couldn’t understand it at all. But then he suddenly stood bolt upright at his desk and said: “I get it! I see! You don’t paint it how it is! You paint it how it looks!” Against the odds, Brujis has found a way of using photography to enter the world that the Aboriginal boy suggested existed out there, out of reach to the Western way of seeing ‘how it is’. Perhaps it is a step too far to call Brujis’ work religious, but it does occupy an extremely interesting philosophical terrain of its own in the history of contemporary photography.