Recomposing the Landscape

From the very outset, the landscape—though only as a point of departure—has been Aldemar Ibrahimović’s thematic choice. For beyond recognisability and impression, which serve as his starting point, he places and arranges his vistas within a new order and a new set of chromatic values. At times, these take the form of distilled signs and allegorical transformations; at others, they are simply the sheer beauty of the natural. In essence, such a concept represents a lyrical and reflective experience, while, in artistic terms, it constitutes an elaboration (or deconstruction) and refinement of the initial impression.

In deconstructing and recomposing landscapes or visions, Ibrahimović leaves no seams visible; rather, by heightening details and introducing accents, he directs movement across the surface of the painting. His choices, although subjective in terms of colour and composition, remain recognisable through an indispensable detail. In this way, he arrives at a distinctive form of “analysis” in which nothing remains quite the same, yet everything is unmistakably present, condensed into planes of signs and a new construction. This refined complexity of Ibrahimović’s paintings amounts to a universalisation of our “eternal theme” through a clearly legible visual language.

The Montenegrin landscape conceived in this way—or, indeed, space more generally—is not merely Ibrahimović’s attempt to escape impression (there are simpler ways of doing so), to which the majority of painters in Montenegrin art, from beginners and amateurs to artists of the oldest generations, have paid tribute. Rather, it is essentially a dismantling of traditionalist schemes, a redistribution and recombination undertaken in response to artistic necessity: the representation of an isolated vision, an exaltation of particularity. Thus, the iconography of Ibrahimović’s paintings consists of familiar vistas of northern Montenegro, stripped of conventional perception. The painting becomes a compilation of landscape values—of what the artist finds most valuable or most exciting—and, in a particular sense, a lucid emphasis on the defining features of the region.

“…Everything is reduced to pure visuality, and everything becomes a metaphor for life and existence,” as Zuvdija Hodžić observed of these distinctive emblems. This iconosphere of the homeland is treated and transformed through an intimate “narration” and imbued with the luminous festivities of Mediterranean spaces (Ibrahimović lived for years on the Greek islands). What emerges is a wondrous territory, a dreamlike union of earth and sky, and of their still-preserved primordial character. “He constructs visual wholes that are strikingly fresh and distinctive, while preserving a pure visuality,” Olga Perović notes on one occasion.

Fully conscious of the artistic processes in which he himself participates, Ibrahimović has established an independent painterly position. His works possess an entirely modern and contemporary resonance, although they have in no way stepped beyond the bounds of classical artistic categories. They are characterised by straightforward stylistic and linguistic qualities: distinctive canvases composed of multiple planes and motifs which, with the passage of time and through the process of artistic development, increasingly approach a poetic and symbolic project.

In spirit, Ibrahimović’s painting contains something of the Neo-Romantic. Yet the colour, compositional arrangement, and emotion through which familiar features of the landscape are fractured, modified, and reduced connect his work with expressive explorations. Moreover, at moments he moves away even from these, occasionally achieving a lyrical semi-abstraction. In such radical interventions, he resolves the pictorial conception through broad fields of colour, while always retaining a clear “reflection” of condensed reality in blades of grass or other associative details characteristic of the landscape. Although these solutions are heterogeneous in their visual language, their correlation is achieved through the cultivated syntax of pure painting.

Generally speaking, the painting of Aldemar Ibrahimović has emerged at the intersection of primary and analytical qualities and, in essence, represents a departure from the traditionalist spirit that surrounds it.

Mladen Lompar 22. oktobar 2006. (From an unpublished book)