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When, on the far side of non-objectivity, outlines and figures, planes and layers from nature began to surface once again, Murtić did not understand this as the revenge of tradition or as the vengeance of the organic world (“The empire of nature strikes back”). After all, he had never ruptured the umbilical cord with organic and elastic growth, for all his forms have their basis in physical energy and in coherence of touch, in the tactile and optical qualities of both the material used and the parallel system of light and shadow evoked. In the eighties, then, he had no need of any trend to seduce him back to figuration and narration, for he had kept constantly open his need for a dialogue with the visible, the necessity, even, of dramatic confrontation.
Tonko Maroević,
Poet, essayist, translator, art and literary critic