Every work of art is a measure of time: It is determined by the hours that went into its creation, while marking a moment in an artist’s career, as well as his or her place in art history. It’s also a reach for immortality, a message in a bottle tossed into a sea of infinitude stretching beyond death. Roman Opalka (1931–2011), a Polish-French Conceptualist, was an empirical investigator of these issues.
Better known in Europe than here, Opalka began in the late 1950s as a painter whose approach connected more to Art Informel, the Continental equivalent of AbEx, than to France’s Pop Art variant, Nouveau Réalisme. Still, he favored brushstrokes that seem carefully laid out rather than splashed or slashed across the canvas.
In 1965, he embarked on a project that would occupy him until he died: rendering numbers counting toward infinity, starting with 1. His compositions filled with tiny, white numerals, and over time, their backgrounds, which were initially gray, grew lighter until the results became indistinguishable from white monochromes. Moreover, Opalka documented his face as he aged in black-and-white photos; in them, we see his hair and skin grow paler, much like the paintings.
By the end of his life, Opalka had reached the number 5 million, but what did this effort mean? It was a quixotic quest, in which success was unattainable. This deliberate pursuit of futility distinguishes him from On Kawara, whose date paintings are rooted in the concreteness of the everyday. Opalka, however, was interested in something vastly larger: an endless universe in which even the greatest artists seem small.
—Howard Halle