Roman Opałka | OPALKA 1965/1 - ∞, Détail 3029180-3047372
OPALKA 1965/1 – ∞, Détail 3029180-3047372
Acrylic on canvas
76 3/4 x 53 1/4 inches (194.9 x 135.3 cm)
© 2019 Roman Opalka / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Photo: Tom Powel Imaging
In 1965, Roman Opałka began his Détail paintings as a way to manifest the incessant passage of time in the face of mortality. The project, titled Opałka 1965/1 – ∞, was initiated when the artist painted the number 1 in the upper left corner of a canvas whose dimensions exactly matched the door of his Warsaw studio. He continued sequentially in rows until he ran out of space, at which point he would continue the sequence on another canvas. Looking at his oeuvre as a whole, one may observe a systematic progression of canvases from white on black, to white on gray, to, finally, white on white. His final canvases are essentially monochromatic—the artist dubbed these blanc merité, “well-earned white”—with the numbers barely visible through the slight changes in impasto. Opałka continued the project for 46 years, until his death in 2011, concluding with the number 5,607,249. He understood the series to be an act of self-determination. “The last Détail,” he once stated, “probably incomplete, will in fact be the only painting that is truly finished because when it ends my concept ends.”
Two complementary exhibitions—one at Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice and the other at BUILDING in Milan—are now paying tribute to Opałka’s series, described in the New York Times by Jason Farago as “one of the most obsessive yet emotional projects of postwar art.” Farago wrote of the Venice presentation, on view through November 24, as among the smartest shows on view during the Venice Biennale. Curator Chiara Bertola placed Opałka’s first and last Détails together for the very first time, on either side of Italian Renaissance painter Lo Schiavone’s Conversion of St. Paul (1542). “When viewed face-to-face,” Farago wrote, “you feel you have stepped into the space of a life.”