(...)
The ability to liberate from mere imitation of the outer aspects of the real, which Murtić had already exhibited was to become more emphasized in the sixties, achieving its culmination in the following decade in painting of the free and powerful expression of gestures and dreams. He remained capable of retaining the quiet, inconspicuous, or even underground references to a geographical horizon and an anthropological universe of the artist that gradually emanates through the pigment, allusions of the substances and tonalities which are now more restrained, in a gamma of brown, earth, and white, deep blue, black and orange. But, it seemed that only at the end of the eighties, even the slightest references to various "novelties" and "conditions" in the international art milieu mentioned at the beginning, disappeared from Murtić's paintings. Then, having almost automatic overcome the paroxysm of a direct and perhaps, in some aspects, almost inappropriately optimistic subjective expression, the artist came in touch with "culture" and with a social reality that was becoming increasingly chaotic and decayed to such extent, that it was finally overtaken by the absurd and terrible disease of war. He seems, even in face of unexpectedly discovered appearance of the painting,to insist on a human message which is desirable, but increasingly arduous, toilsome, and difficult to achieve.
(...)
Recent Murtić's paintings are hence transformed into signs, sometimes into presentations of the original, absolute, and almost "metaphysical" truth: peculiar icons, ecstatic, heavenly "joie de vivre". However, it is not a matter, especially not in the more balanced and witty parts regardless of the possible, apparent, and recognizable references, not even in the real sense of the word, of "presentations" of realistic landscapes, and even less of a simple re-shaping of the unchangeable parts of paradise but more- and it seems that the sudden landslides of the sky and the deep and airy "penetrations" which make the space active and passable confirm this – of an "epic" expression of a hard, persistent, instinctive and human longing for natural happiness: despite all the pain, hatred and intolerance, betrayals, overturns, cruelty and misery, which is brought by everyday life experience.
Landscapes: direct certainties, visions that are immediately transformed into common property, but together make ideal places, landscapes of the soul, fantasies, transformations, longings which light up our lives, often so sad and impossible.
Dino Marangon
Art critic