THE TIME ETERNAL OF A HUMANISM WITHOUT FRONTIERS

The paintings and gouaches of 1998 and 1999 with which Edo Murtić ends a century that, in 1921, witnessed his birth, speak for themselves. They are both self-sufficient and eternally present because they speak to us about time. About Murti} time, the time of gesture, of the speed of the painter’s interventions and inscriptions in the space of the picture, of the force of the impact on the distribution of energy and light on paper or canvas. Murtić time is that of the personal rooting of a man in his style. This time has fairly few things in common with that of geography or history. In spite of the fact that the artist took a committed part in the anti-Nazi resistance movement, and that the political fate of his country has been in the very centre of his interests. The time of history is a time to which we are subjected, which we have the illusion of constantly creating. Edo Murtić though has chosen the time of his works himself and, completely naturally, has himself formed and consolidated it. This choice took place under the influence of the force of a higher urge: a cosmic energy is what breathes spirit into his sensibility, the mother of all languages and all expressive urgencies, and this active sensibility has actually been embodied in the painterly gesture.

The emergence of free gestural painting after the Second World War marked the return of the century to its modernity. New York Action Painting featured, for example, Gothic accents in the gesturality of Franz Kline, culminating, finally, in the Pollockian drip. Parisian Art Informel embodied in Hartung or Mathieu aggrandised the energetic impact of the formula "form-not-form". In that well-known decisive period of the fifties, Edo Murti} readily made the great cause of the freedom of inspiration of brushstroke his own. And he waged this battle for the affirmation of personality via style completely alone, starting from his native Croatia. In the period "between tachism and Action Painting", between 1956 and 1964 he was to take over this language of modernity of the fifties in its totality and embrace it as his own, in his own perspectives and his references, in his work and his exhibitions, at home and abroad. He was always present everywhere the triumph of modernity was being affirmed, and in 1958 alone took part in the three biggest events that occur in the contemporary art world: the Vennice Biennale, the Carnegie Prize in Pittsburgh and Documenta in Kassel.

The total devotion of Murtić to the style of free gesturality has never, however, cut him off from his deep roots in his Croatian soil, a mixture of Balkan and Mediterranean: the aridity of the rock, the dark waters of the sea, the brilliant luminosity of the sun at its zenith. If the lightning flash of Lyric Abstraction had not once and for all captured the time of his imagination, Edo Murtić would have remained what he was at the beginning of his career, a solar landscape painter, more and more orphic and Matissean. The temptation appeared several times in his work. He was able to transfer brilliantly the irradiating power of the Mediterranean light into the colour or the emotional strategy of colour based on a very flexible dialectic between the blacks or nocturnal blues of flat surfaces and the fluid traces of ochres, yellows and reds. The recent works bear witness to the mastery achieved by the artist in the emotional treatment of colour. Murtić must surely be one of the greatest of the colourists of Lyric Abstraction. His immense emotional energy has made him a director, often a dramatic director, who puts a genuinely luminous calligraphy upon the stage. The soaring movement of the brush has inscribed the trace of colour against a background of dark space. Colour, which rules the movement of light, plays a major role in the expressive repertoire of the artist. It coagulates the pictorial material while dramatising it. It is not by chance that Murtić has done a number of decors and stage sets. What is becoming more and more evident in the year 2000 is the specific dimension that the chromatic plays in the Lyric Abstraction of Murtić: colour plays a major role, while with Hartung or Vedova, for example, it comes in only as accessory. This sovereign presence in his liberty of inscription clearly reveals the power of the bond that joins the painter to the profundity of the nature of his Mediterranean soil. This is an organic factor of optimism and sensual vitality that resists every inroad of existential anxiety, so often flaring up in the phantasmagoric imagination of today’s creative minds. The sovereign presence of colour with its monumental evidentiality shows how much Edo Murtić feels at ease in his style, in the painting of gesture that allows him to express in an immediate and spontaneous manner all the existential pulses that invigorate the consciousness of a sensitive and responsive being living in the chaotic world of today. To paint, for Edo Murtić, is to live the painful contradictions of the world of today more intensely. Recent history wanted the Croatian painter to know these chaotic contradictions on the front line. His testimony can seem to be, it is true, a cry of alarm, but it also comes as a fabulous message of hope in the humanist values that constitute the foundation of our western civilisation. At the time of Bosnia and Kosovo, the painting of the Croatian artist assumes its full meaning and helps us to live better, just like that of Picasso in his time, the first time so magisterially with Guernica, and the second time with the massacres in Korea. This is why it seems that today, on the threshold of the third millennium, Edo Murtić seems precisely what he is: the Croatian painter of the 20th century, and, more precisely, an international protagonist of gestural vitalism. Murtić time appears to us in its global truth. This is the time of man, the time eternal of a humanism without frontiers.

Pierre Restany
Milan, February 2000