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The televised image and the numeric structure of digital photography, where the negative has been abolished, have lost the materiality of a support that had rooted their iconography in reality. The only referential specificity that can in the near or later future guide researchers in their investigations will be the presence, within the image, of a sign or system of signs that are the direct emanation of gestural vitalism, on the computer screen.
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That predestination to free gestures was to shape the whole development of Edo Murtić's work. Its effects can be felt in the landscapes of the Adriatic cycle dating from the late 1940s, and it was to mark his American experiences too (1951-52). But it was a predestination that immediately projected him much farther: into the midst of the prospective debate on postwar painting between Europe and the USA. The emergence of free gestural painting after the Second World War marked the 20th century's return to modernity.
Edo certainly did not miss that return to modernity. His stay in the USA in 1951 brought him into contact with De Kooning and Pollock. His numerous trips to Paris familiarised him with the evolution of the painters in the French tradition towards Apstract Cubism (Jean Bazaine, Alfred Manessier, Gustave Singier or Roger Bissière). The play of fragmented forms and recomposed spatial volumes, allied with an unrestrained treatment of colour, attracted him between 1953 and 1956, a period in which Edo felt close to the dominant movement of the École de Paris, as witnessed by his large mural compositions for various public establishments in Zagreb. But from 1956, the fragmented forms melted into their surroundings and the inner animation of material drew him closer to Tachisme and Informel.
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But his instinct took him beyond the play of Tachisme and Action Painting, inducing him wholeheartedly to espouse the great challenge of modernity posed by the major international events of the time: Venice, the Carnegie Prize in Pittsburgh, Documenta at Kassel. In 1958 he was present at all three. And he identified that breadth of horizons with the blossoming of free movement which, to take up the terms of Vladimir Maleković, is at once the calligraphy of movement and a saraband of colour.
After 1970 Edo Murtić achieved an absolute command of his style and has continued freely to deploy it at his ease ever since. He has established himself as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, colourists of lyrical abstraction. His boundless energy has made him a director of luminous calligraphy. Colour governs the movement of light and his pictorial material texture, while dramatising it. Such is Murtić's secret: if free action is the bearer of vital energy, colour is the barometer of sensitivity.
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All critics, and me to start with, have felt obliged to stress that Murtić's total commitment to free gesturality has never severed him from his roots in Croatian soil, nor from the troubled history of that land. As if there could ever have been any doubt! As if faithfulness to his roots in an existential experience were incompatible with the practice, at any given point in time, of the universal language of modernity!
Murtić's lyrical abstraction assumes, in the total freedom of instinct, that semantic and affective alternation between the general and the particular statement. This is the secret of his remarkable vitality, for he has succeeded, conceptually and affectively, in eliminating the last barriers on his expressive motivations.
Pierre Restany
Art critic and cultural philospher, founder of the Palais de Tokyo