From the very beginning Murtic’s temperament has been of a dynamic-gestural order: this is confirmed by the landscapes of a more impressionist kind. I would say that he has only followed, over the years, his own instinct, adjusting it, if anything, to the requirements of the developing European culture. Today his ’prints in space’ – as I would call them – are or may be interpreted in an atemporal and therefore ahistoric meaning: this is the same dynamic tension of the sign-stain that I note, for example, in Tintoretto, with all his charge of turgidity, vital fulness, dash.
It is this – i.e., the refusal of the conditioning of fashion and of the ideology in power – that measures what I have called the ’pulse’ of the artist. That was important yesterday, and it is even more important today. For an intellectual, that does not mean avoiding action, i.e., refusing the civil and political battle; rather, it means first of all the defence of one’s freedom. And that in its turn means – let me repeat: beyond the lures of the market and the seduction of power – the understanding of one’s own identity, one’s own nature, one’s own biological structure. Then you can be simultaneously topical and true to your matrix. Unfortunately, the story of art, recent art in particular, tells us of so many colonized artists and few free artists. Being free means refusing imposed membership cards and cheques under the table, understanding and interpreting true human sentiments without giving in to frigid carry-overs of style.
Paolo Rizzi
Art critic