Armando Alemdar Ara starts every picture with sketches of the human body. He then distils all of the sketches into one realistic drawing, which serves as the basis for his abstract composition. In the finished picture we witness a perpetual state of metamorphosis. Some art critics have suggested that because Armando needs the body as an infrastructure for his compositions, he is a figurative painter. In actual fact, Armando is a figurative painter of the spiritual dimension as embodied in the timeless form of the nude. Drawing on his Sufi (mystical Islam) background, Armando has embodied in his art the ancient mystical beliefs in inner spirituality. Armando is part of the Neomodern art movement, which promotes spiritual and aesthetic values in art. In the past four years there has been media and TV coverage on Armando’s work both as one of the creators of Neomodernism and as a painter. Armando is currently researching a PhD at Sussex University with thesis entitled Dialectical Aesthetics.
Armando’s pictures are in public collections, such as the Macedonia Cultural Centre, Skopye, as well as private collections in the UK, the USA, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Switzerland and Macedonia. To celebrate his achievements as an international artist, the National Gallery of Macedonia is organizing an exhibition of Armando’s work in 2005/06. Armando, at the age of 32, will be the first living artist in the history of the gallery to exhibit his work and simultaneously hold series of lectures on philosophy of art. Throughout 2005 Macedonian and Turkish TV stations will be making interviews and documentaries on Armando’s life and work as an artist, lecturer and art historian.