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Murtić presented his work in Italy at the Venice Biennale in 1958, and that first encounter, which revealed the singular pictorial gifts of the artist, very close to the typical modes of post-war French and Italian post-cubism, has given rise to this exhibition in Milan. The charm of “beautiful” painting has not been lost with the spreading of the stains, spurts, splashes of the mannerists. “Beautiful” painting aspires to order, harmony, and visual pleasure while being aware of the topicality of the idiom. Braque taught to everyone the justness of a fundamental relation between form and space. And the teaching produced increasingly diverse fruits in a well-defined sector of post-war art culture. Today art aspires to be something else, in clear contrast to the very principles of avant-garde art, which is the historical premise for the orientation of taste in half a century of surprising turns. Murtić experienced the problems of his generation beyond the frontiers, which could be dangerous ideological frontiers. And the solutions he found, repeating in his pictures certain earlier tests with collages and papiers dechirés, move away from plastic cubist and Dadaist compositions and take on a form at two levels, in a decorative order abounding in deep tonal modulations, chords and antitheses of high expressive intensity. At the origins of Murtić's fantastic images there is always a visual emotion, direct or restyled in the memory of a time or of a country. Murtić has become European by discovering himself.
Giuseppe Marchiori
Publicist and art critic