Landscapes of Memory in the Work of Aldemar Ibrahimović

Aldemar Ibrahimović’s visual and “mental geography”, woven from countless subtle creative impulses, forms a unique personal “cultural landscape” within which the artist creatively intervenes.

For the artist, nature and landscape, architecture, and the human being constitute a sublime “holy trinity”. The inevitable interconnectedness and interdependence of these subjects give rise to Aldemar’s genius loci, which the artist gives form to in an authentic oeuvre.

Belonging to a particular place or space is endowed with the distinctiveness of individual experience, affirmed through a necessary and symbolic attachment to that very space. Hence the strikingly expressive, evocative power of life in Aldemar’s paintings—a power that permanently draws us toward reactions and returns… toward memories. The very titles of his works evoke scenes and images that are metaphysical and distant, yet still ours, intimate and personally significant to each of us: Homeland, Childhood, Crossroads, Listening, Clouds, Morning…

By making aesthetic interventions within the immutable, within the past, the artist renders it fantastic, metaphysical, unreal… Green, purple, or yellow mountains, like massive megalithic formations, “float” in space, establishing themselves with natural ease within the physical fabric of the painting, within the artist’s own intimate landscape.

Aldemar’s painting is a kind of Rožaje kilim, woven from pure chromatic consonances, geometrised forms, exquisite colour textures, and balanced relationships among all its constituent elements. The human presence within it plays the central role, yet not solely as the materialisation of the human figure. More often than not, the architecture in Aldemar’s paintings assumes the expressive contours of the human. The artist’s architectural constructions are the product of his own “architecture of the mind”; they grow out of nature—firm, steadfast, humanised, intricately articulated… rooftops, windows, fences, outlines, and silhouettes… they preserve the memory of the Rožaje house, of its typical storeyed structure… and, viewed from the vantage points of clear horizons, they form a personal architecture of self-fashioning.

Aldemar’s human figure is not a portrait of a specific individual, but a personification of the universal human values of this region—multiculturalism, multiconfessionalism, and multiethnicity. Occasionally, it bears a particular recognisable attribute, just enough to intrigue and evoke a specific context.

Through compositional structuring across multiple planes, the artist, in a manner akin to collage, layers and assembles, mosaic-like, unforgettable scenes, in which each constituent part is a whole unto itself—a picture within a picture, simultaneously bound together by a powerful, archetypal coherence. The bold incursions into time and space, into their very depths, are not mere demonstrations of the artist’s talent and technical command. This inclusive, continuous sequence bears witness to existence, to the amalgamation of civilisational and cultural strata, affirming a confident return to oneself, to one’s own ontological space.

With a restrained emotional charge, a controlled lyrical-abstract geometricism, and an uncompromising poetic-realist intimism, this painting instantly envelops and captivates us with the warmth and fervour of a truth the artist generously shares with us. As the artist closes his spatial circle, departing from and returning to his inner and spatial homeland, we remain transfixed by the beauty of discovering Aldemar’s—indeed our own—landscapes of memory.

Dr Anastazija Miranović Art historian and art critic Septembar 2016.