Roman Opalka, painter of infinity...‏

Roman Opalka, painter of infinity, died on August 6th, aged 79
The Economist, Aug 20th 2011
http://www.economist.com/node/21526288

SLOWLY, though his heart was pounding like a runner’s, Roman Opalka
approached the canvas. He had painted it completely black. The date,
though he set no store by dates, was 1965. Clenched in his left hand
was a pot of white acrylic paint; held tightly in his right was a No.
0 brush, the smallest standard size. He dipped the fine tip into the
paint and then, very gently, as if in slow motion, raised his arm. His
hand was trembling. Carefully he painted the figure 1 at the top
left-hand corner of the canvas. At the same time he whispered, in his
native Polish, jeden, one. The moment was so charged with emotion that
he thought he might collapse. Instead, he had begun.

He had thought about this for years, wondering how he might visualise
time. He did not mean the time of clocks or calendars or hour-glasses;
those were merely instruments of convenience for fixing points at
which to have coffee, or feed the cat. That was time you could even
reverse, by winding back the clock or tipping the hourglass over. He
meant the irreversible continuum of time that flowed through him, the
pulse of his life approaching his death within the vastness of
infinity. For some years early in the 1960s he had played around with
dabs and zigzags of monochrome paint on canvases which he called
“Chronomes”, but he concluded that time was more orderly than that. By
painting numbers in careful succession from one to infinity, or as
near to it as he was destined to get, he would make a work of art that
tracked as well as anything the movement of time in a life, and life
in time.

The idea came easily enough, while he was waiting one winter day in a
cold café in Warsaw for his wife and his friends to come, glancing
impatiently at clock and watch, drumming the moments away on the
table. But it demanded nothing less than the sacrifice of his life.
From the moment of painting the figure 1 until the day he died, when
he had reached well past 5500000 (no commas marred his work), his
daily task was painting numbers and whispering their names, eventually
into a tape recorder. Hence his extreme emotion when he began: his own
“big bang”, signalling his own creation of space-time.

Each canvas was called a “detail”, and all had the same title, “Opalka
1965/ 1-∞”. Typically he would paint around 400 figures a day,
standing almost motionless at the easel. He tried not to travel much,
did not take holidays, and if the journey was unavoidable made what he
called cartes de voyage, continuing his numbers in black ink on
ordinary white paper. The work became so absorbing, so meditative,
that he would try to paint at the deepest hours of night, when only
the bark of a dog or distant cock-crow would disturb the southern
French hillside where he lived.

Heart trouble bothered him, and he once found the little paint-pot
almost too heavy to lift, but he never considered stopping. The number
7777777 floated in his mind as a sort of completion of his
“programme”; but in fact the completion would be his death, as he
often said. Some critics saw his project as a sort of suicide, and he
did not altogether dispute that. No sort of afterlife tempted him, he
had no belief in one; but he very much liked a story by Marguerite
Yourcenar in which a man built a boat and set out into infinity.

Over the 46 years of his enterprise, his technique and materials
barely changed. His canvases, 233 in all, were always 196 x 135cm, a
good size to work at standing and to carry in outstretched arms. Brush
and paint never varied. His figures were roughly a centimetre tall,
most made with two deliberate strokes of the brush, and allowed to
fade away as his paint ran out, like the trailing tail of a comet. He
often said he painted like a man out walking, unaware of his steps
unless he stumbled. If that happened, he never went back.

His biggest innovation was to change the background colour. In 1968 he
made it grey; in 1972—when, barely able to breathe, he passed
1000000—he decided to add 1% more white to that grey every year. By
2008 the white of ground and figures was virtually the same, except
that he thought of the ground as “well-earned white”, arduously
brought out of the original black, and except that the newly painted
figures would shine out against it until they dried. He approached
this invisibility with a sort of exaltation.

Self-portrait with numbers

From 1968, at the end of every working day, he took a black-and-white
photograph of his impassive face against the canvas. This too was part
of the project. It was not egoism or narcissism, he insisted. After
all, his art told people nothing about his quotidian life. None of
it—the birth in France, the childhood in Poland interrupted by war,
the art studies in Warsaw, the year in Berlin—seemed important beside
the immensity of the self-imposed task. He spoke about that, when
asked, rather diffidently, softly rubbing the rims of his glasses in
one hand, talking of Heidegger and Pascal and the notions of number
held by the ancient Greeks, smiling often with what seemed to be
repressed joy. And why not? Though people saw him as a prisoner, he
felt more liberated with every stroke of the brush. Each of his
self-portraits, with steadily silvering hair and whitening skin,
showed him progressing as inevitably as his numbers into the infinity
he longed for.

http://www.ato.jp/blog/2011/06/roman-opalka.html
http://www.mchampetier.com/Estampa-Jean-Olivier-Hucleux-2252-obra.html
http://roman.opalka.pagesperso-orange.fr/L'oeuvre%20de%20Roman%20Opalka.htm
http://ernestocortes.blogspot.com/2010/01/jueves-21ene09-roman-opalka-el-arte-del.html