Aldemar Ibrahimović’s Spatialised Phenomenology of Memory

“…When I design a building (read: paint/create), I frequently find myself sinking into old, half-forgotten memories, and then I try to recollect what the remembered architectural situation was really like, what it had meant to me at the time, and I try to think how it could help me now to revive that vibrant atmosphere pervaded by the simple presence of things, in which everything had its own specific place and form. And although I cannot trace any special forms, there is a hint of fullness and of richness which makes me think: this I have seen before. Yet, at the same time, I know that it is all new and different, and that there is no direct reference to a former work of architecture which might divulge the secret of the memory-laden mood… Iread the essence of Aldemar Ibrahimović’s creative oeuvre in light of the above quotation by Peter Zumthor. It concerns the formation of a singular artistic world situated within the mental geography of a particular milieu, whose supporting structure is firmly anchored in the native ground. Diverse cultural landscapes cover the layered slopes of memory composed of houses, cities, people, and worlds both known and unknown, unreal yet real, at once near and distant… one’s own.

It is precisely for this reason that, when contemplating Aldemar’s artistic oeuvre in its entirety, I cannot resist the urge to draw a parallel with architecture, for I perceive the creator of the work as a consummate maestro/architect, one who constructs and builds his edifice/painting with precision and care. Each of its parts is structurally synchronised with the function compositionally assigned to it. Everything is multi-layered, a compatible part of the whole; at the same time, each element can exist independently, like a picture within a picture, without compromising the underlying thought or idea.

Undoubtedly, Aldemar Ibrahimović’s artistic oeuvre holds a special place in contemporary Montenegrin art. Besides its uniqueness and distinctive authorial recognisability at first sight, Aldemar’s work harmoniously brings together specific artistic qualities: continuous formal maturation, a fully developed and authentic pictorial language, an insightful, analytical approach, profound and nuanced thoughtfulness, and a rooted, powerful attachment to his native ground.

At the centre of Aldemar’s painting, we do not find simplified thematic or philosophical statements. Human figures, landscapes, cities, and/or their characteristic fragments form a complex, multilayered relationship: the relationship between man and space, space and time, the outer world and inner experience. It is precisely for this reason that Aldemar Ibrahimović cannot be regarded exclusively as a landscape painter or merely as a painter of urban motifs. In his artistic work, nature, architecture, and the human figure are bound together in a unified system of meaning — an authorial poetics that developed gradually and consistently. Nature/landscape, architecture, and man constitute the fundamental determinants of Aldemar’s pictorial world: a kind of “holy trinity” of his art.

“…For this reason, his paintings appear dreamlike, as though lifted from the outlines of landscapes that are unreal yet possible, but also wrested from sheer abstraction, in which things cease to be what they are… If Aldemar’s artistic oeuvre is considered in terms of its development, it is possible to identify several creative phases/cycles, which are not entirely separate from one another but, on the contrary, intertwine and flow smoothly into each other. They may be provisionally divided into an early phase of academic/formal formation — that is, a phase of urban landscapes — façades and rooftops; a phase of the native landscape; a phase of the recomposed and associative-abstract landscape; and a mature phase of figurative urban poetics and a distinctive synthesis of time.

Throughout all these creative phases, the formal emphasis changed; the essential need, however, did not. It always remained the same: reality/the real world as the point of departure for creating one’s own artistic world and a unique pictorial order/language.

The beginnings of

Ibrahimović’s artistic creation are linked to his academic education and the strong presence of drawing, form, and composition as fundamental artistic concerns. Regarding his relationship to space as a phenomenon, Aldemar speaks that, like many young artists, in his early years, he felt a strong need for the descriptive and the naturalistic in his work, when drawing and composition were the primary pillars of his artistic and educational formation and development. The crucial turning point came when he engaged more seriously with modern painting, particularly through study trips and further artistic training, and through the lived experience of works by great masters such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. During this period, his professor at the Sarajevo Academy of Fine Arts, Radenko Mišević, also exerted a powerful influence on Ibrahimović’s artistic development. Taking all these influences into account, a gradual transformation occurred in Aldemar’s conception of painting and the painted canvas: it ceased to be an “extension” or “continuation” of external space/the external world, and became an autonomous whole, with its own internal laws.

The thematic concerns that would remain constant — the figure, the urban motif, and the landscape — began to emerge already in this early creative phase. The artist’s interest in portraiture is also evident, though it would not remain a lasting artistic preoccupation; rather, it would persist through the commercial production of portraits during his two decades of seasonal travel around the Mediterranean.

In this period, Aldemar was drawn to urban scenery and landscape, while assigning symbolic and metaphysical meaning to human figures, incorporating them into the pictorial space as bearers of a “quiet drama”. The analytical, studio-based works — Model, Rest, and In the Waiting Room (1986) — point to his initial artistic quests and enquiries. Although in his early work he remained strongly tied to subject matter, the motif never disrupted the underlying pictorial logic. On the contrary, it served as the point of departure for the formation of a subjective, yet controlled and cultivated painterly expression.

“…Portraits are one of my important artistic preoccupations. I have created a great many of them in various techniques — from drawing, through dry pastel, to oil. It is often said that a person’s face is a unity of spirit and body, so I think portraiture is inseparable from landscape. Our appearance, our face, often tells exactly where we come from, and from which land or region. I think it is one indivisible whole… In Aldemar’s initial creative phase, portraiture occupies a prominent place. Portraits would, as noted, mark his twenty years of Mediterranean travels (1985– 2005) — from Hvar in Croatia, through prestigious summer resorts in Turkey, to Alykes on Zakynthos in Greece. His seasonal travels and the painting of commissioned portraits, predominantly in dry pastel, enabled the artist to pursue his major artistic preoccupations with ease and without compromise, securing optimal studio conditions, the finest painting materials, and so forth.

“…That long, dynamic journey from my student days in Sarajevo to the shores of Greece shaped me not only as a portraitist but as an artist who, through thousands of faces, came to know the depths of human nature… Aldemar’s work in portraiture, considered within the context of portraiture as both an artistic problem and a genre, reveals, very early on, a significant aspect of his development as an artist. The portraits testify to the artist’s ability to convey character, psychology, and an emotional connection with a particular person. In them, Ibrahimović’s analytical approach to the characterisation of his subjects and to their multilayered psychological articulation comes fully to the fore. The artist’s 1984 Self-Portrait in oil foreshadows the analytical dimension of Aldemar’s painting discussed above.

The Self-Portrait depicts the artist as a young man with a stern, serious expression, his gaze directed to the side, toward the interlocutor/viewer. These are the eyes of a man who purposefully and inquisitively “targets” the problem — eyes that simultaneously question and take a stance. Masterfully executed in broad brushstrokes, with a contrasting background in red tones that accentuates the portrait figure, the painting, through the alternation of illuminated and shadowed passages, brings forth those artistic qualities that would, a few years later (1989), in the Portrait of the Mother, culminate in a sophisticated crescendo.

The Portrait of the Mother confirms not only technical and artisanal maturity (a more assured, vigorous brushstroke and a more nuanced palette) and a penetrating analytical approach, but also introduces a refined sensibility — a noble, subtle engagement with the motif.

Yet, as noted, portraiture did not remain Ibrahimović’s ultimate or primary artistic focus. Work on portraits was a significant “school of sensitivity” to human presence, which would later be transposed differently, through universally coded messages by which he communicates with the world as a whole, through the human shadow, the silhouette, and the faceless and anonymous presence of man in space. Aldemar would return to portraiture occasionally, almost always for a specific purpose. However, in the analysis of his artistic oeuvre, portraits are exceptionally important, for they reveal that, at the beginning of his creative path, he demonstrated a talent for uncovering the essential, the defining inner qualities, and what lies deeply buried within people, space, and time…

“…Landscape became, in a sense, my preoccupation already during my studies in Sarajevo. At that time, I approached the urban landscape differently. I would select or frame urban settings and fragments of those settings that were, for me at the time, visually compelling. I believe this was, above all, the result of the education I received during my studies, and then of the work and experience I accumulated and absorbed, consciously or subconsciously. This is how one arrives at one’s own distinctive visual expression… One of the first clearly defined phases in Ibrahimović’s creative oeuvre is that of urban landscapes — urban/architectural motifs, façades, and rooftops. This cycle occupies a special place in Aldemar’s oeuvre, for it is at this stage that the artist demonstrates, for the first time, what would become one of his enduring features: the capacity to transform the visible into the psychologically perceived and into a distinctive, appropriated poetic space. He began painting urban motifs during his studies in Sarajevo — at first academically, and then more freely, through structure, texture, and the rhythm of façades and openings. What interests the artist is not merely the appearance, arrangement, and rhythm of these elements (windows, chimneys, rooftops), but above all the story carried by the social traces of life: dilapidation, nostalgia, melancholy, intimation, hope…

The works Motif from Sarajevo and Rooftops already announce Aldemar’s potential and new preoccupations, marked by a certain metaphysical sensitivity. In these paintings, the urban scene is not merely a cityscape, but a space of inner impulses and reflections. In this creative phase, the artist’s pictorial temperament — composed of contemplation, analytical rigour, and curiosity — manifests itself in the way he constructs stable compositions, a restrained colour palette predominantly in earth tones, and a firm, clearly articulated drawing.

When we observe Aldemar’s cityscapes — fragments (rooftops and façades) of crumbling, forgotten buildings — they seem to rest within themselves. In a particular way, our perception becomes silent, impartial, and still; it does not reach out to possess. The object we are observing seems to have always been there — beyond sign and symbol. In that vacuum of perception, a certain memory may emerge from the depths of time. As we look at these rooftops and façades, we catch a glimpse of the world in its wholeness, and there is nothing that cannot be understood. Behind those closed/open windows, indicated by subdued light, lies the force/saga of everyday, transient life. One need only look long enough to see it, to comprehend it, and to live it anew.

This so-called urban cycle of façades and rooftops is also important because it is here, for the first time, that the idea of the city emerges as a site where the external and the internal are simultaneously situated. Thus, Aldemar’s city is not only dynamic and mobile — a space of movement — but also a space of memory, alienation, tension, and silence. This will be further developed and elaborated in later phases; however, it is already clearly present here as an underlying feeling, one that suggests that architecture is never neutral.

He looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. The world was beautiful, strange, and mysterious. Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, sky and river, woods and mountains, all beautiful, all mysterious and enchanting, and in the midst of it, he, Siddhartha, the awakened one, on the way to himself. — Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha. After the cityscapes, fragments of city architecture, and his study-based explorations, Ibrahimović turns with ever-increasing intensity toward the native landscape. This phase represents one of the most significant shifts in his painting — not because he abandons what preceded it8, but because he qualitatively expands and deepens his relationship to space and to the image.

Upon returning to his homeland, to Rožaje, Aldemar gradually abandons his previous thematic interests, turning toward the nature of northern Montenegro, its magnificent expanses — slopes, meadows, mountains, earth, and light. For the artist, the native landscape is not merely a scene, but a source of philosophical and existential reflection on life, time, and belonging. In this creative phase, the landscape moves beyond the level of realistic impression. While in the earlier paintings a referential connection to the visible world — a tree, a blade of grass, a boundary, a cloud — is still recognisable, the artist increasingly reduces the visible, purifies detail, and shifts the focus to the relationships between colour planes, to composition, and to the painting’s internal dynamics. Particularly notable are works such as Courtyards, Untitled, and Homesteads, in which what is seen becomes a stimulus for creating a new reality.

The development of colour also marks the cycle of the native landscape. Instead of “academic/classical” earth tones, Ibrahimović increasingly employs bright, delicately positioned and unified planes of colour, constructing complex chromatic relationships. In this creative phase, we observe the artist’s mastery in synthesising vast expanses and translating them into a more modern pictorial arrangement, in which native forms, colour, and light nevertheless remain alive. For this reason, Aldemar’s painting in this period is at once lyrical and reflective. It is not merely an image of nature, but above all a portrayal of its essential, spiritual, and symbolic power.

“…The relationship to colour, line, and space; underpainting in warm and cool tones; underpainting with complementary colours; careful modelling through colour and purity of tone — all of these contribute to a greater fullness of form, to the relationship of one element to another, and to the compositional coherence and weight of forms. The clarity of linear structure, which provides the basis for subsequent chromatic elaboration, for a scale of contrasts and their balance; the relationship to space, perspective, colour, and underpainting — in complementary and warm-cool colours — as well as the treatment of line as both a visual and constructive element, opened up new horizons and directed me toward building forms with even greater patience and constructing compositions with care, in deep respect for all these elements…ˮ9 In certain earlier critical reviews, this phase has been divided into two internal groups: more realistic rural motifs, such as The Shepherd, The Flock, and Birch Trees, and the more mature native landscapes, in which the artist synthesises the perceived and consciously weakens the illusion of perspective to strengthen expression and lyrical colour. This very process shows how Ibrahimović found his authentic path – from the immediate to the transformed, from the manifest/extroverted to the introverted/inner dimension of the painting.

“…The old architecture of Rožaje, more precisely that of the Fetahovska Mahala, the quarter in which I grew up, was largely preserved until thirty or forty years ago… I grew up in such an environment; I remember it well, and for me it has been a lifelong source of inspiration. Unfortunately, that heritage has been almost destroyed…ˮ10 “…In fact, I transpose natural structures and textures into a visual expression that is my own. Simply put, I place and arrange the vistas into a new order and new colour values…”11, “…into an engaging and modern visual expression, which only, in certain segments, evokes the environment in which I live or in which I once stayed…” At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, one of the key phrases for understanding Ibrahimović’s work — landscape as pretext — becomes more clearly formulated. This phrase, taken from a critical review by the writer and art historian Mladen Lompar, perhaps most precisely defines the “construct/skeleton” of Aldemar’s artistic poetics. Although landscape remains his thematic concern, it is no longer the goal, but rather “a point of departure”. The painting assumes a new architectonics: vistas are rearranged anew, while colouristic and compositional values, through a reductive method, are transformed into reduced signs, allegorical transfigurations, and new constructions of space.

“…The artist must reshape reality in opposition to photographic perception, and in favour of his ‘inner psychic reality’. In this way, spiritual and visual wholes are brought together. I mainly paint urban and pastoral settings. The fragments I engage with are found in my immediate and wider surroundings… In this phase, Ibrahimović definitively moves beyond the framework of landscape as impression. He does not paint what he sees, but rather what he thinks and feels through what is seen. What is at stake here is the seamless deconstruction and recomposition of the landscape, a refined complexity, a sensuous modernism, and the painter’s right to his own choice and subjective organisation of space. The artist’s mental landscape increasingly occupies the canvas surface. The form and formal structure of nature, the native ground, and space are now fully determined by an inner geography. In searching for himself through the centring of forms/ meanings within the picture plane, and by attaching significance to a particular scene through its “intensification” and isolation, Aldemar creates a distinctive scenography of identity.

Megalithic forms dominate the multi-layered structure of his paintings. They are houses and people, protection/shelter, defence and frontal presence — a steadfast en face, a humanised shield, a reduced city: Aldemar’s Stonehenge of a real-unreal world, one that is constantly being created anew and redefined. In fact, it has been here since time immemorial; it simply exists. Having conquered this world, the artist has forever attained the freedom of creation, with which he seductively enchants, like a fascinating cosmic explosion scattering thousands of fragmented particles across the canvas. These are the distinctive elements of the genesis of a world in becoming, a world that is only just being constituted; or perhaps they are the scattered remnants of the existing one, brought about by the same explosion, for the sake of establishing some new order.

That magical, perfectly balanced simultaneity — that questioning and wonder, on this or the other side of the world/being — continually sustains and reflects the intriguing tension of anticipation within the continuum of the lightness of creative play. The artist masterfully guides us through the world of his painting.

Here we encounter a series of works resolved in a similar compositional manner — blades of grass appear in the foreground, as if sprouting from the lower edges of the painting; stonelike/megalithic, associative-abstract structures occupy the centre; while the upper part of the canvas represents the sky — blue, yellow, purple, green, and/or all these brought into balance and integrated into a whole (There in the Hills, Graveyard Stones…). A gentle breeze sways the blades of grass and sets the floating geometrised forms in motion, imbuing the scenes with vibrant energy. Despite this pulsing mobility, these canvases exude a contemplative tranquillity. In associative-figurative compositions, such as Homeland (2006), the foreground is occupied by a young woman with traditionally styled hair; behind her, at the centre of the painting, the heads of horses emerge in an ochre-yellow palette, while a white dog — a faithful companion and a frequent motif, like horses, in Aldemar’s allusive compositions — rises playfully and protectively above them. We also encounter them in one of the variants of There in the Hills. These present, native memory-perceptual residues would gradually lead to abstract paintings, which, however, would not become a lasting artistic orientation. This would certainly be an experimental step forward — also in the context of textural-structural explorations of coloured layers and experimentation with new, “non-painterly” materials — but it was a phase in which the artist would not remain long (2005–2008).

“…Every change in my painting arose from a particular inner necessity. For many years, the points of departure in my work were grounded in a concrete subject — landscape, whether natural or urban, faces, figures… their transformation became increasingly free from any descriptive element. I devoted ever greater attention to pure pictorial form, so that, at one point, these forms became purely abstract…Yet I soon returned to figuration, even though the critical response to that period of my work was exceptionally positive… One might conclude that this is the creative phase during which the essence of Aldemar’s painting style becomes firmly established: the reduction of narrative and detail, pronounced planarity, a more freely treated space, a strong colourism of complementary and contrasting colours, balanced composition, and an ever-growing reliance on associativity. Here it becomes entirely clear that Ibrahimović is not interested in description, but in the essence of the motif.

“…A person from these regions is always faced with the dilemma of whether to leave or stay, and such thoughts overcome me from time to time. But the provinces more often reside — or do not reside — within the person rather than the other way round… For Aldemar, art is a fragmentation of life experiences and settings from birth to the present day. This is precisely what the works from his current creative phase reveal. 16 The mature creative phase of Aldemar Ibrahimović’s artistic oeuvre sublimates all the preceding ones — nature/landscape, the native ground, architecture, urban structures, figures, memories, and a metaphysical atmosphere, blending them into a unique artistic world — the world of urban poetics, in the full and all-encompassing complexity of the concept. It is a poetics in which the above-mentioned elements appear as signs of a fragmented, deeply considered world, with the coordinate points of a distinctive mental geography woven from multilayered cultural landscapes.

In this phase, one of the key motifs becomes the old architecture of Rožaje and its disappearance. Ibrahimović’s relationship to his native ground acquires additional weight and value — it is no longer only lyrical and/or meditative, but also memory-inflected and civilisational in significance. The vanished old houses of Rožaje, roofs covered with wooden shingles, time-worn windows, the old Trgovište (the old market quarter)…traditional architecture and cultural heritage continue to live in the magical space of the painting.

“…We always need someone else to point out to us the values we have inherited, but neither appreciate nor preserve…ˮ17 It is precisely here that another essential value and significance of Aldemar’s painting is revealed — to preserve from oblivion what history, urban-planning destruction, and time erase. The factually documented past is now read as transformed and poeticised within the metaphysical atmosphere of Aldemar’s painting, where it continues to live just as convincingly and realistically, with a hint of melancholic, wistful nostalgia. Ibrahimović’s urban space is at once real and dreamlike, recognisable and unreal, native and universal. The compositionally multi-planar mise-en-scène establishes an inverse relationship – images within the image, which, through a certain kind of inner gaze, observe themselves, while simultaneously coexisting in a special introspective correlation with the figures. In certain works, Aldemar paints the “all-seeing eye” as a detail, as if wishing, in the spirit of Bonito Oliva, to say: …“My eye is too close to me, and I am not what I see…”; in fact, in a Proustian manner, he conveys the message that the real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

“…I went through a period in which I painted only urban landscapes — rooftops — because figures simply seemed superfluous to me; I was afraid to include them. Over time, however, the figure appeared, bringing dynamism and movement to the composition itself. I notice that there are fewer and fewer people in these urban spaces of ours. In the street where I live, my son practically has no one to play with — there are no children — and I am glad whenever I see people; and if urban spaces are without people, then what are they for… In Aldemar’s mature creative phase, his relationship to the human figure becomes particularly characteristic. It is the frightened, insecure, astonished, questioning human being of our time: the man-shadow, the mask, the faceless silhouette, the figure in anticipation, in arrested movement and/or flight, trapped at the crossroads of time and space. Imperceptibly, we are drawn into a fine, subtle transfer from I to We, from the personal into a universally claimed and vaulted space. Lost people, passing one another by and/or scattered in an exodus/flight from an insecure reality and an uncertain future, drift escapistically from “nowhere” to “somewhere”. They appear mostly in groups, rarely as individuals. Caring mothers protectively carry their small children in their arms. They are nurturers, guardians, saviours…the strength and power of the world. In their arms, they carry its future. Aldemar’s human being is “Nobody” and “Everybody”, a boundary dweller, a wayside figure who waits, passes through, sees others off, departs, and arrives…An anonymous individual without the possibility of fully recognizing and knowing himself and the world. In Ibrahimović’s faceless and anonymous human figure, what is at stake is not a lack of character, but its universalisation. The human figure/human being is not an individual character, but an existential position.

Hence, too, the powerful presence of time as a theme. In a kind of time machine and an “architecture of unified time”, native, lyrical, and urban motifs become universal representations of the world’s rift in time. The old and the new world do not stand opposite one another, in a gap, as conflicting sides; rather, they support and sustain one another, coexisting synergistically. In Aldemar’s painting, neither exists without the other.

“…I am provoked by the destruction of architecture in our region, which has reached alarming proportions. Through my colour palette and pictorial expression, I try to give form to what I am thinking about within the formats of rectangles and squares… Aldemar understands the imperfection of this world, its challenges, fears, and weaknesses. By drawing attention to them, he brings into consciousness the need for the “healing” of society and the individual, but not at the expense of nature — the nature within us and the nature around us. In this context, Aldemar’s art tends toward social engagement, although this layer of his work is not explicitly legible (Uncertainty, 2020). In an interactive communication with the world and with himself, the artist colours everyday life with the warm, rich colour spectrum of the Mediterranean, the translucent light of the Greek islands, and the crisp freshness of mountain mornings. In the imperfections of a decentred world, Aldemar sees, seeks, and finds the beauty of living.

“…I strive, in my own way, to interpret reality — my own lived reality and surroundings — or to create a new reality. In this, naturally, imagination plays a significant role. The objects that come into being, which I depict and define in my paintings, are not purely internal in nature — they constitute a new world that is not merely the experience of what has been lived. Perhaps this is the eternal instinctive striving toward the deciphering of life itself and of our being, or striving toward the absolute. Who knows…?! 20 Ultimately, the question of identity is today a question of integrity. A person living through the historical, social, political, and cultural turning points of his time feels secure only within himself, in what he carries in his soul, in memory, in his inner language. Although we live in a world of “distorted and depleted meaning”, a world of inner predetermination and unified, stereotypical culture, Ibrahimović neither wishes to create nor does he create art without a face, without memory, without a past. For tradition is not something that is merely passed on; it must be earned and won. The world around us cannot be understood as an isolated system of defined objects and concepts that we select exclusively by rational choice, but as a network of unfinished processes in which apparently stable things are only a reflection of the stability of their images.

Ibrahimović reminds us that “…time was not just a flow, but a presence […] the visible trace of a hand…” (Meša Selimović) The titles of the works emblematically indicate the context of the artist’s concerns: A Playlet, Expectation, Crossroads, Memories, Everyday Life, Homeland, Childhood, Care, Leisure, Agreement, Farewell, Čaršija (Old Bazaar), A Moment, Morning, An Autumn Day, Nostalgia, Return, Before the Unknown, Parting, Tranquillity, Witnesses, An Alley, At the Close of the Day, A Cry Without Meaning, Great Preparations, Here Around Us, In Passing…

“…A painter must earn his coincidences… Within them, almost imagined, memories reside.

For Aldemar, space is nature, architecture, man, atmosphere, ambience, and time in its continuum. It is also change, transience, movement, attitude, character, the “inner eye, inwardness, ontological belonging, being, the world…

The essence of Aldemar Ibrahimović’s artistic expression is grounded in several strongly intertwined principles — the relationship to space, the transformation of motif, colour, the relationship to time/memory, and a metaphysical atmosphere. His painting is entirely in the spirit of Étienne Souriau’s observation that a good painting must have three clearly visible layers: the content layer, the layer of pictorial-plastic elements, and the layer of emotional charge.

In Ibrahimović’s work, space is the central category. It is not a passive background, but an active bearer of meaning. Urban space, nature/landscape, the union of the urban and the pastoral — space is always psychological, spiritually active, and compelling.

Aldemar’s nature/landscape, architecture, city, or human being never remains what it is in immediate experience. They are disassembled and/or synthesised, shifted, reduced, redefined, and reconstructed. In their original form, they serve merely as a pretext for what will come into being within the optics of Aldemar’s canvas.

For the artist, colour/colouration has equal significance to the other constructive and load-bearing elements of painting (composition, space, form…). Ibrahimović’s colours are not decorative, although they possess exceptional appeal and potency; they are drawing, atmosphere, time, feeling, and the structure of space. They are light — Mediterranean, warm, yellow light filled with tonal gradation.

“…There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art, transform a yellow spot into the sun… (Picasso).

Aldemar Ibrahimović’s paintings bear witness to that masterful transformation. Colour, in Aldemar’s case, constructs the painting. In this context, Aldemar’s painting is linked to the traditions of Fauvism, poetic realism, and colouristic intimism; at the same time, however, it is deeply authorial.

Aldemar Ibrahimović’s art does not represent a spatialised painting; what is at stake here is a painting of the memory of space. It is a catalogue of lived, sensory information and feelings. In it, childhood, the native ground, traditional and historical traces, architecture disappearing and architecture emerging, contemporary emptiness, existential melancholy, and the hope that art can nevertheless establish a balance between old and new worlds and spaces are interwoven. The artist needs the gaze of the world, the light of the sun, to confirm the “irresistible truth of art. For, “to know etymologically points to “having seen, to the experience of a gaze that does not observe things from the outside, but is immersed in the matter of the world. In a Bergsonian sense, in Aldemar’s paintings, the matter becomes memory. In fact, paintings are no longer merely paintings; they become anthropological and social statements.

Ibrahimović’s oeuvre is infused with a sophisticated metaphysical, neo-Romantic openness. It developed gradually, consistently, and organically: from early figuration and an academic foundation, through cityscapes — rooftops and façades — native landscapes, and recomposed, associative-abstract spaces, to the mature phase in which the past, the city, architecture, and the man-shadow merge into a recognisable authorial universe.

Aldemar Ibrahimović’s poetics represents a fusion of the lyrical and the reflective, the native and the universal, the figurative and the associative-abstract. His painting rests upon the quiet, disciplined, and deeply considered construction of a world that is a sublimation of experience, memory, knowledge, and feeling. In this world, man is both present and absent, space is both real and inward, and time is both stratified and connected.

The crucial strength of Aldemar Ibrahimović’s artistic statement lies in his ability to turn the native ground into a universal artistic theme and space into an existential category. His art represents a kind of exodus into nostos. Frequent journeys along the shores of the Mediterranean kept the sun warm in the homeland. Geographical and mental distances are necessary to rediscover and appreciate the native roots left behind in the past. Homecomings cannot erase the “non-home, the experience of being a stranger. Belonging to a place, a language, a culture… always contains the necessary dislocation and non-belonging.

Otherwise, there is a risk of falling into the trap of “closed identity, which in turn entails the denial of the other, the different, the dissimilar… Memory enables the doubling of a former moment and the present. In that magical return to oneself, we move through the realm of the fantastic, for the artist aesthetically intervenes in what is immutable, in what belongs to the past, and, in his work, “abolishes or transcends the category of transience. What comes to the fore is the reflexive power of life, the capacity for (inter)action and for a return to one’s ontological being. Aldemar’s art represents a spatialised phenomenology of breathing, one that resists the relentless passage of time and its manifold faces…