"The chosen ten paintings are a part of artistic opus, which has been going on for almost fifty years. It is a challenge that includes pleasure, but also questions objectivity. Nevertheless, just one subjective judgement will be a stimulus in creating a fan of different opinions, which again leads to acceptable results. The beginnings, connected with the Hlebine School of Naive Art, and their master Ivan Generalić, were a temptation and a model. Dragutin Orak masters the perfection of performance by accepting the iconography of idealized landscape, and idyllic genre-scenes from rural life. At the same time, he expresses his individual contribution by extremely warm atmosphere. After years of working in the manner of naive art, the painter, inclined to researching, engages into gradual deviations, which transform his realistic visions into conceived images. That process is followed by greater interest for events inside the painting, for their spiritual dimension. It was a path, which, by some logic of gradual continuity, took the painter into spheres of abstraction, into its lyric variants.These are fanciful compositions with somewhat symbolic signs, and surrealistic "vocabulary", which are joined by the need for artistic psychoanalysis. The next step of his breakthrough into imagination takes him to geometrism, which he builds on the principles of optical effects and op-art experience in the track of his friend Ivo Friščić, who was an exceptional phenomenon in Croatian art. The desire for searching took Dragutin Orak out of the autochthonous surroundings towards universal solutions by the sequence of steps, in which he endeavoured to mark his own pluralism. All achievements of Dragutin Orak meet at the focus of three great jubilees: 60 years of life, 45 years of painting, and 40 years of art teaching career. He theoretically spread art culture in school and society as a teacher, and as an artist he did it creatively in the silence of his atelier. His achievements put him along with those, who have made Croatian culture indebted by their intellectual, emotional and physical efforts."

Juraj Baldani, Foreword for The Collection of Reproductions