Landscape as a Point of Departure

The Centre for Contemporary Art of Montenegro organised a solo exhibition of Aldemar Ibrahimović’s paintings at the “Centar Gallery in Podgorica. Ibrahimović graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo in 1986. To date, he has held some fifteen solo exhibitions and has taken part in more than fifty group exhibitions both in Montenegro and abroad. He has received several awards, including the Association of Fine Artists of Montenegro traditional award and the Municipal Award of the town of Rožaje. He has been a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Montenegro since 1987. He lives and works in Rožaje. A colour catalogue with an introductory text by academician Mladen Lompar accompanied Ibrahimović’s current exhibition.

Imbued with this lyrical essence, Ibrahimović constructs associative configurations and multiplicative structures that symbiotically permeate one another and coherently complement each other. These vibrant chords resonate melodiously on waves of imaginative chromatic modulations.

Ibrahimović’s compositional scheme is elaborated, highly differentiated, and moderately geometricised, resting on analytical drawing experience and an aestheticised sensitivity to multiplicative morphological gradations. In fact, it is exceptionally stable, balanced, and well-proportioned; although masterfully rendered in a planar, two-dimensional mode, it occasionally opens onto extended depth perspectives. With an innate and exceptional chromatic range, Ibrahimović impeccably counterpoints warm and cool colour values and very subtly modulates the alternation between dark and light passages. His sense of value relationships is optically highly developed, so that his works could also exist as exceptional black-and-white graphic compositions.

Ibrahimović powerfully demonstrates this intrinsic chromatic-value potential in the immediacy of pictorial execution. In fact, he does not confine himself merely to the chromatic layering of paint or to the facture achieved with a stiff brush and palette knife; rather, he incorporates into the chromatic substance a wide variety of non-painterly materials — corrugated packing cardboard, pieces of coarse fabric and cardboard, hemp fibre, and granular substrate — thereby effectively achieving rich rustic-tactile modalities. The exceptionally elaborate structurality is skilfully enriched by thick, fluid, and occasionally transparent paint applications. In this emanated, symphonic-chordal pictorial discourse, grotesque, correlatively involved, entirely black-and-white passages play a significant role. Although Ibrahimović’s painting is essentially non-representational and lyrically associative, in certain works, he comes very close to entirely abstract themes, in which geometricised surfaces and rich chromaticism reflect the totality of pictorial attributes. In this continuous alternation of the associative-abstract tides of ebb and flow, the overall warmth, immediacy, and melodiousness of Ibrahimović’s inspired pictorial articulations are conveyed in sublimated form.

Slobodan SLOVINIĆ April 2007.