Roman Opalka
Born in France on August 27, 1931, the Polish-born artist moved to Warsaw with his family in 1946 where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. Before moving back to France, he started his life project Opalka 1965/1-∞ in his studio in Warsaw, a work with which the artist has devoted his life trying to trap the flow of time. This work is a fascinating process that consists in painting on canvases, always having the same size (196x135 cm), using the white color and having as subject the increasing numbering of rational integers from 1 to infinity. "Trembling because of the tension before the folly of such an undertaking, I dunked the brush in a jar and, slightly raising my arm, I left the first sign, 1, at the top on the left, on the edge of the canvas, so that no space was left outside from the only logical structure that I was given. " So Opalka commented on the opening words of his creative project - a project that lasted a lifetime – and that was interrupted on August 6, 2012. The background of the canvas, originally black, is added a hundredth of white each time a new canvas is started so that, as the days pass by, one gets the impression that the numbers written down from top left to right, gradually get confused with the clarity of the paintings. After each canvass is completed, each of them called Détail, the numbering continues on another canvas. Since 1972 Opalka introduces a change to his ritual: every night, after work, he took a photographic self-portrait in black and white - always at the same distance from the target, in the same position, with the same expression - and a recorder fixes his voice while he pronounces the painted numbers. The gradual fading of the canvases (for the increasing amount of white on the background)concides with the fading of a gaunt and worn-by-age face. A staring gaze, frontal, expressionless, almost a sculpture. And if the decision to photograph his face was born - as he said - "from the imperious need not to lose anything while wheedling time," the same is true also for the Travel Cards, drawings written in pen with black ink on paper that while changing the medium and technique, remain faithful to Opalka’s one and fundamental need: " to energize the moment" offering a mirror in which observe the infinity.