The Poetics of the Urban – Paintings that Observe People

“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. It can be seen in the oldest photographs of Rožaje from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 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. In the early 1950s, Jovan Krunić from Belgrade published a book documenting the architecture of Rožaje; his photographs preserve what was later lost. He did his best to have the entire left bank of the town placed under UNESCO protection…However, the authorities at the time were not receptive to that idea. At the time, Rožaje was compared with Kruševo in Macedonia, which is visited by a million tourists a year, and even with Prizren. This example confirms that we always need someone else to point out to us the values we have inherited, but neither appreciate nor preserve. — Interview with Aldemar Ibrahimović, Radio and Television Rožaje, RTR, 2023.

The non-existent houses with shingled roofs, and leaning divans with hidden, half-open windows — whose shadows, although they have long since vanished from this world, still stand to this day along the upper reaches of the River Ibar — emerge in the magical space of Aldemar Ibrahimović’s paintings, in the mature culmination of his creative work, as a lasting and cherished memory.

The old Trgovište, that mysterious geometry of dream, later Rožaje, was and has remained a refuge where people, driven partly by fear and partly by the desire to find themselves, to settle and endure, sought shelter from persecution and sowed new hopes at this mythical crossroads.

Despite the apparent incompatibility of the old with the “new age, the former has pressed itself against the latter, against Aldemar Ibrahimović’s recognisable visual imagination, which carries within it the sign of what remains undreamed and not yet born. The creative metamorphoses of this passionate creator are interwoven with thoughts and interpretations of an authentic urban living environment, from which his intimate poetics emerges.

The inner space of Aldemar’s paintings is the fruit of an imagination through which life and intuitive artistic reflection are mirrored. Entry is free, although that does not mean that entering the painting comes without a price.

The collage-like geometry of the artist’s urban core is dispersed and, by itself, forms a mobile image of the world, one that inevitably appears in the magical mirrors of small shop windows, in alleyways intersected by a vertical chromatic scale, and in colourful settees, each of which conceals a theatre of dream.

It seems as though Aldemar’s human figures yearn to abandon time and this world, and to immerse themselves in some other reality that would suit them better — in some world in which, perhaps, time does not exist. Yet, through the paintings that observe people, the artist seems to convey the message that the world they seek is the world of their own souls.

Aldemar cannot depict any other gallery of images except the one that already resides in the souls of his figures. It is as though he can give them nothing more than an opportunity, an impetus, and some hidden key which will help their own world become visible.

In the recomposed image of the world of Aldemar’s landscape, there are no seams; rather, by accentuating details, the artist plays upon the surface of the painting with undisguised intention. He creates specific analyses of the unbearable lightness of living, in which nothing is the same any longer, for everything has been condensed and given in sign-like planes and in a new, original construction.

Milan LUTOVAC Bar, jul 2023.