The Paintings of Aldemar Ibrahimović – Architecture of Unified Time

You are a man in one space and time Who lives only now and here And knows nothing of the boundless Space of time In which I find myself Present From the distant yesterday To the distant tomorrow.

Mehmedalija Mak Dizdar Aldemar Ibrahimović’s representative exhibition at the Modern Gallery is a true celebration of art in Podgorica. This is not only because of the numerous admirers of his work, nor merely because this artist deserves far greater critical attention, but also because his creative work is universal in character. From whatever vantage point it is observed, it captures viewers’ attention with its distinctiveness. It is at once accessible and profound: it needs no excessive elaboration, yet it offers a multitude of interpretations.

In following Aldemar Ibrahimović’s entire body of work, we may observe that he is an artist of deep contemplation and intellectual quest, one who problematises his painterly visions—documents of a singular worldview—through lyrical landscape and associative reflections on natural and native-land motifs. Yet this spatial determinant is universal, never local, never narrowly defined. This art arises from a singular experience of the world, whatever its foundation may be. Thus, Ibrahimović is an artist whom the world understands and who, in turn, understands the world around him exceptionally well.

It is worth noting that, for this occasion, a selection of works painted over the last decade has been made. They showcase the distinctiveness of visual representations that hint at the forgotten expanses of the artist’s vatan (native land). This reduced urban landscape, with its pastoral overtones, is a kind of immediate vertical paradigm through which the artist depicts the rift of the world within time.

Aldemar Ibrahimović’s art is characterised by a spirit of timelessness, distancing from reality, distant reminiscences, which the artist achieves through a specific visual language. In the first place, he accomplishes this through bold compositional solutions in which one discerns the procedure of transforming lyrical landscape into abstract forms, whose iconographic synthesis gives birth to a universe of new intuitive meanings. For no single element within the painting asserts itself sovereignly; everything is in the service of stylemes that emulate the metaphysical openness of the image. This questioning of form and expression, over which the artist shows exceptional mastery, serves the work’s semiotic and spiritual content. Openness, after all, is a key feature of the artist’s work.

Aldemar’s painting is, in spirit, Neo-Romantic. His depictions of čardaks (traditional closed balconies), heavy wooden gates with massive wings and twisted iron rings, and his representations of grass and mountain slopes nevertheless also integrate the artist’s own existential and psychological norms. They carry within them the atmosphere of a deeply tragic journey of the peoples of this region.

The vulnerability, melancholy, and nostalgia permeating these works—which relate to departure and farewell from the ancestral hearth—can only be explained by socio-historical reasons. That melancholy never abandons these landscapes, even in their brightest colouristic renderings. It is omnipresent, like an admonitory doubt that the brightness of the Mediterranean sun (legible in the fullness of Naples yellow, bearing impressions of his life in Greece) will eventually sink and retreat before a higher, tragic light.

These epithets of “sweetened poison” are present in all his works, frozen in an absurd reprise of meta-reality. Thus, lives, cities, and feelings alike are merely reprises that, through the artist’s treatment, live and endure in a unique language. These arrangements of cities, this sequencing of houses, suggest that life is everywhere the same: burdensome and transient. These are not merely urban dormitories, nor ancient čardaks, but places where one lives, that is, where one disappears. That is the central theme of art. And the fate of man stands at its centre.

A pain of narration transforms and ennobles depictions of the finest lyricism and vitality, while at the same time purifying them and pointing the way toward an iconology grounded in the aforementioned existential and psychological underpinning. In Aldemar’s most recent works, one detects an engagement with and interest in global migration. Through his exploration of these themes, his painting becomes ever more contemporary, and the historical patterns connected to our regional context are directed toward the tragedy of the contemporary moment—and, simultaneously, toward the fate of a world in which time flows through the most distant past (Giambattista Vico).

Ibrahimović is one of those artists who testify that, through stillness and modesty, a valuable artistic order can be built. He is one of those who restore our faith in the sources of art. His originality lies not only in his devotion to his native land and its themes, but also in his relationship to the world—both past and present. And Ibrahimović’s oeuvre is precisely a fusion of colours and thoughts, a joining of times. Ultimately, an artist whose entire body of work is bound to his native land shows us, through his work, how to bring back to life the spaces of time through which a stone-slumbering world floats. Of art, one need ask no more.

Selma Đečević, MA Art Historian September, 2019.