Landscape as Anchor

The Montenegrin native landscape has been an inspirational point of reference for painters such as Petar Lubarda, Milo Milunović, and Branko Filo Filipović. Their best canvases were created here, in Montenegro. Even today, within contemporary Montenegrin art, there are artists for whom it remains provocative. One of them is Aldemar Ibrahimović, an academically trained painter from Rožaje, as confirmed by the exhibition at the “Most Gallery in Podgorica.

In the earlier paintings, there is still an accentuated referential connection with the world of visible phenomena: a tree, a blade of grass, a form, and a boundary can be recognised. The canvases follow a horizontal organisational scheme, and in them one can observe the artist’s careful attention to composition and to the cultivation of his painterly idiom. Courtyards, a 1997 canvas awarded at the Traditional Exhibition of the Association of Fine Artists of Montenegro, announced certain new concerns that the artist would explore in a series of new works, including Untitled and Homesteads. The painting was conceptualised as a surface rooted in the experiences of modern art.

Aldemar Ibrahimović does not allow himself to be led by details; rather, he purifies them on the canvas. Through accentuated green and the resonance of yellow, he achieves the contrasts necessary for pictorial dynamism, thereby intensifying chromatic values. In the aforementioned works, he knows how to soften the sharpness of boundaries, reducing them to an encounter of coloured surfaces. What is seen now serves only as a stimulus for the creation of a new reality, achieved exclusively through the relationships between pictorial elements — carefully considered, and in the finest canvases even refined — confirming Ibrahimović not only as an artist who stands apart from certain contemporary developments, currents, and shifts on the contemporary art scene, but also as a lyrical, meditative painter of enviable painterly culture. In his works, one can also discern a special relationship to the earth as source and destination: that which gives strength at birth and shelter in death.

Nataša Nikčević Pobjeda, jun 1999.