Roman Opalka

Acrylic on canvas
77 3/16 x 53 1/8 inches (196 x 135 cm)
Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein
© Roman Opalka / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

All my work is a single thing, the description from one to infinity. A single thing, a single life.
—Roman Opałka

In 1965, Roman Opałka began his Opałka 1965/1 – ∞ project with the number 1, which he painted in white on the upper left-hand corner of a black canvas. The canvas measured 196 x 135 cm (77 3/16 x 53 1/8 inches), a size determined by his own height and the width of the door of his Warsaw studio. He continued painting numbers sequentially in rows until he ran out of space. Each succeeding canvas, or Détail as he called it, resumed the progression where the previous one had stopped. Each Détail has the same dimensions and is undated, attesting to its status as a part of the single, continuous work, Opałka 1965/1 – ∞, which marches toward the impossible goal of infinity. Together, they constitute the artist’s attempt to represent the dynamics of time in the face of the finality of death and the endlessness of eternity.

In 1972, Opałka began adding a 1% mixture of white to the black for each new canvas, gradually reducing the tonal value of the ground. The present painting, featuring the numbers 2,806,353 to 2,828,874, develops atop an expanse of silvery gray. To create it, the artist used an extremely thin-tipped brush and painted until the pigment all but vanished, at which point he reloaded the brush. Minute variations in the texture and rendering of the numbers emerge, such that they appear to shift, shimmer, or even disappear. Opałka embraced these deviations as marks of time’s ineluctable flow: subtle imprints of what he described as “the correlated moments of daily life.”

Ultimately, Opałka 1965/1 – ∞ spanned forty-six years; the artist worked on the series every day until his death in 2011. In total, he created 233 Détail paintings—an average of five per year. An avid reader of philosophy, he upheld existentialist Martin Heidegger’s notion that acknowledging human finitude within the ceaselessness of time was the essential aspect of becoming fully aware of one’s condition of being. By turns obsessive and poetic, concrete and atmospheric, each Détail incarnates Opałka’s continuous act of self-determination.