This is how I again see the Zagreb painter in his essential lines, defined in expressionist terms from the very beginning, ready to give his compositions – which include today his outstanding luminous enamels – the active character which reveals an extraordinary vital presence. A presence which was noted immediately, since the first post-war years, in Yugoslavia and Europe: a painter who abandoned himseslf to colouristic inspiration (or rather vocation) with a sudden frenzy, between assonances and dissonances, harmonies and disharmonies, driven by the perennial will to 'participate', to be close to the magic of nature in its truest, most musical and sometimes most secret aspects.
Murtić's story is concretized in a very specific cultural field: in a 'time' which the painter revives with the secure intuition of his outstanding evocative capacity, and in accordance with the expressive formula reflecting certain typical aspects of Informel cleansed of its more negative material dross. A distant world, maybe, but a world that is transformed through colour into an intensely emotional vision determined by the encounter of diverse civilizations in an artistic Europe freeing itself of many traditional features in order to assume new formal values and new spiritual messages from the unbiased proposals from an innovative culture such as the American. Nevertheless, in his understanding of painting Murtić has maintained a European accent by virtue of the traditional field of culture in which he was moulded. He is true to his obvious Central European origins in a pictorial discourse based on the evocative force of the image whose pure naturalistic source is often related to a less apparent, even secret search for inner truth hidden under the tangle of immediate graphic combinations.
Giuseppe Marchiori,
Theoretician and art critic