The Metaphysical Fairy Tale of Suspended Time

“In language there exists a kind of hidden allegory that arouses no wonder precisely because it is familiar, yet becomes unfamiliar when transposed into a visual image, leading us to the point where we no longer believe our own eyes… a fairy tale is expected to be incredible!”

The analytical contemplation of the world as a lived and experiential phenomenon in art has resulted in the world’s visual transformation—a transformation that emerged in resistance to photographic perception and in favour of “a turning toward inner psychic reality.” It is within this domain that we may locate the creative poetics of the painter Aldemar Ibrahimović, who finds his inspiration in “images of the native land,” in which urban and pastoral ambiences coexist within unified spiritual and visual entities. His painting reveals sophisticated visual sensibility, clear intellectual articulation, and poetic refinement. These hallmarks effectively define a pictorial oeuvre in which a harmonious fusion of rationalintellectual and romantic-sensory modernism has been achieved—a modernism that manifests itself in the mental, plastic, and pictorial vitalism of his painting.

Aldemar’s paintings demand no interpretive code, nor any deciphering of the message they convey. The legibility of his motifs is clear; their interpretative texture, however, is complex, revealing the artist’s intentions towards a distinctive visual expression that manifests itself in the reduction and abstraction of a displaced reality. The visual and linguistic roots of this painting can be found in Cubism and its optical representation of reality. In fact, we are speaking of the Cubist realism of Sheeler and Demuth, who schematise recognisable urban architecture within a formal geometric vocabulary. Striving to penetrate more deeply into the essence of nature and the urban world as a single existential space in which contemporary man lives, Aldemar disrupts the classical conception of painting by introducing forms of abstract geometrism and the absurd compositional solutions of metaphysical painting.

His works are defined by the architectural construction of space and by the decomposition of one or more painterly events into separate fragments or episodes, held together by inner energetic states and visual harmony. He moves from an analytical approach to reality toward a visual synthesis, which has led certain forms to sublimate the self-expressiveness of abstract content.

The rhythm of figuration unfolds across the canvas surface through the successive arrangement of associative and real elements. The pictorial space is closed, and the forms are positioned frontally on a uniform plane, which lends the composition solidity and balance. Stasis and suspended time within a defined space suggest a classical, measured approach to the purity of form, the simplification of drawing, pictorial saturation, a subdued atmosphere, and an unreal light.

Within a compositionally distilled ensemble composed of memory and perceptual inserts, everything is logically and precisely placed, akin to a collage in which urban structures, rural cottages, cityscapes, streets, meadows, courtyards, windows, doors, hills, clouds, and human figures are brought into relation with one another. The human figure, most often presented as an isolated individual, represents one of the attributes that breathe life into and give meaning to the ambient “desolation”. It appears as a silhouette without identifying features, or as a Mannerist figure turned with its back to the viewer, as a symbol of the alienation that has permeated every pore of contemporary society. Its presence is reminiscent of Eastern shadow theatre, within whose unreality the subtle essence of man’s spiritual and physical being is concealed.

In Aldemar’s paintings, nothing is left to chance. A stimulating idea has crystallised and set in motion new thought processes, reflected in the formalisation of a composition that, at first glance, emanates coldness, balance, and calm. The power of colour in the consonances of pure harmonies of yellows, greens, and whites, and their intercommunication with passages of red, blue, violet, and black, creates chromatic orchestrations that lend these paintings a note of poetic warmth. Clouds and animated forms, freely floating through the pictorial space, further contribute to its decorative quality and to the dreamlike expansion of the artist’s emotions. These are the signs that possess a degree of plastic autonomy, discreetly distancing themselves from their primary objective point of departure.

The paintings of Aldemar Ibrahimović evoke a metaphysical fairy tale born in the silence of suspended time. They are the expression of the spiritual pictoriality and romantic states of an artist deeply bound to his homeland—for, as Ivo Andrić once wrote: “At the beginning of all roads and paths, at the very thought of them, there is a sharply and indelibly incised trail on which I walked freely for the first time.” He belongs to that circle of Montenegrin artists who, with a distinctive visual refinement of modern vocabulary, embed their sensory and spiritual sensations into the poetics of a specific ambient space.

Ljiljana Zeković, Art Historian Cetinje, November 2009.