Authorial Poetics

Aldemar Ibrahimović’s painting has thus far been characterized by critics as a form of lyrical landscape painting of exceptional colouristic vitality, in which the artist continually returns to motifs of the Montenegrin landscape, as well as to those of the so-called urban landscape with its distinct iconographic features.

Drawing upon the traditions of the so-called colouristic-poetic realism and colouristic intimism, Aldemar Ibrahimović establishes complex stylistic and poetic connections both with modern French figurative painting from the first quarter of the 20th century and with the urban iconography that first emerged as a dominant motif in German New Objectivity painting (Neue Sachlichkeit) at the end of the 1920s.

Ibrahimović also comes full circle with the tradition of our modern colouristic realism: motifs of the wounded city, frozen in time, appeared in 1950 in Edo Murtić’s Zadar cycle, in which the discontinuity of urban space and time—of a city devastated and demolished by war—is poignantly conveyed. On the other hand, what connects Edo Murtić and Ibrahimović in the transmission of colouristic codes through time is yet another great name of modern landscape colourism: Petar Dobrović!

Murtić attended Dobrović’s Master Workshop in Belgrade (1940–41), and Ibrahimović inherits this colouristic legacy “second-hand”. Yet, in these landscapes, there is a colouristic fire that reveals Mediterranean, southern, and maritime coordinates and origins.

This occasionally wounded, traumatised, and fragmented urban landscape in Ibrahimović’s work points to the deeper and more permanent psycho-emotional ruptures of our broader region: from the necessity of leaving one’s homeland for the distant world due to existential reasons, to war-ravaged territories, and to every other form of discontinuity in the recording and preservation of the region’s history.

Ibrahimović constructs the painting in multiple planes, cut and assembled like theatrical scenery, reminiscent of the re-establishment of memory after a tremendous shock or stress, during which the continuity of personal, cultural, and historical memory has been interrupted, with people who more closely resemble marionettes, shadows, or ghosts, as if left with no power to influence their own present or future. Yet, even if a sombre sense of loss or suspension in time and space often suffuses his canvases, Ibrahimović’s urban landscape is simultaneously deeply wistful, melancholic, and devoid of any depressive undertones.

In his more recent works, vibrant yellow tones and shades of deep purple, blue, and green increasingly appear, signalling a kind of metaphorical healing through colour, accompanied by a growing shift toward the structuring of planes and fragments within the tradition of lyrical abstraction.

Undoubtedly a deeply contemplative and emotive painter, Aldemar Ibrahimović has created an exceptionally distinctive artistic trajectory—one that has transcended all the aforementioned modernist influences and has become a recognisable and original authorial poetics.

Iva Körbler Zagreb, September 2012.